After a while, Seckou felt it was time. He was ready to pack his bags and book a flight. Word was that his father was in Bamako, the capital of Mali. But just as he was about to go, he heard that his father had died. “There’s no right or wrong,” says Seckou. “It was just supposed to happen that way.”

Seckou’s father had been a Quranic teacher, a kind of wandering man of the spirit, who would settle in a community, help any way he could and then move on. He was helping out a family in Bamako when he died. The husband had passed away and there were lots of kids to feed. The whole neighbourhood looked on him as their spiritual father.

His name was Elhaji Mohammed Keita. But he had other nicknames: Lamine and Dari. His great grandfather, Malick Keita, was born back in slavery days in Kita, in the west of Mali. His grandfather, Youssouf Soumah Keita, had moved to a place called Kolia in north western Guinea, just south of the border with Senegal. That’s were he, Mohammed, was born and where he grew up.  Of course, in those days, none of those nations – Mali, Senegal, Guinea – existed yet as such. The region was still one large borderless zone of Manding, Bambara, Soninké, Fulani, Sousou, Djola and other peoples, living under French rule.

Mohammed was a Keita and, in the land of the Mandé, Keita is a name to contend with. All Keitas are the descendants of a great Emperor called Sundjata Keita, who ruled the Manding Empire in the 13^th century. You can be as poor as a field mouse, but if your name is Keita, you’re still royalty. Confusingly however, Mohammed’s family were known in Kolia by the name of Soumah, which was a form of ‘royal’ greeting. Another was Mansareng, meaning ‘royal family’. Every time a Keita was addressed, especially by a griot, these honorific titles were liable to come out: Keita…Soumah…Mansareng!  It was like saying “Oh Keita…most royal…most noble lineage etc etc.”  In the case of Seckou’s father’s family, the ‘Soumah’ part became a fixture and eventually took over as the only name by which they were known at home in Kolia. At one point, Mohammed and some of his brothers went back to the ancestral lands in Mali to change their ID cards and ‘reclaim’ their original identity: the Keita name and the pride it carried with it.

Mohammed ‘Soumah’ Keita’s reputation as a holy man and teacher spread far and wide, and in the late 1970s he was invited to Dakar by the sister of the Senegalese president, Leopold Senghor. On his way there he stopped off in an old town on the banks of the Casamance River in southern Senegal called Ziguinchor. He’d had a premonition that if he passed that way, he would meet a woman and she would become his wife. They would have a son. It was like a dream; so that’s where he went.

In Ziguinchor he visited the compound of a famous griot called Jali Kemo Cissokho, and there, in the semi-darkness of late evening, he was introduced to the griot’s young daughter, Fatou Bintou. Even though there were plenty of other young women in the greeting line, and it was so dark that Elhaji could hardly see Fatou’s face, when he came shake her hand, he wouldn’t let it go. He knew that his dream had come true. They married and had one son; Seckou Keita.

Soon afterwards, Mohammed left to continue his roving life. He came back to see Seckou a few times when he was just a baby, but after that, father and son never saw each other again. Nonetheless, Seckou learned later that Mohammed had never stopped asking after him.

Ziguinchor is an old Portuguese trading post that became the capital of the Casamance (from the Portuguese Casa di Mansa or ‘House of the King’), the southernmost region of Senegal, which is cut off from the rest of the country by the ex-British colony and independent state of The Gambia. The town is an out of the way place: green, relaxed and turtle-paced. Not far from the Atlantic and surrounded by forests, mangrove swamps and rice paddies, its bustling marché St Maur and old colonial buildings with their shady colonnades, exude a sense of easy African provincialism. If you stand on the town’s main bridge, it’s possible to see dolphins gambolling in the languid Casamance River.

Seckou grew up in a suburb called Lindiane. Its adobe houses and yards were tightly packed together and burrowed through by a labyrinth of narrow sandy alleyways. All kinds of people lived there: Christians, Muslims, Animists, Manding, Djola, Manjack, Balantes, Peul,Wolof. They all seemed to get along fine. There were shacks on the street corners selling palm or cashew wine. The streets buzzed when someone got married or held a naming ceremony for their child. Without any great self-consciousness of the fact, Lindiane was what you might call the model West African multi-cultural neighbourhood. And it was full of musicians, drummers and dancers.

Seckou was raised in a household where music was everything: livelihood, ancestry, family and community. His grandfather and guardian, Jali Kemo Cissokho, could trace his griot lineage back at least three centuries, to the time when the first kora was given by the djinns to Jali Mady Wuleng in the kingdom of Gabou. Mady ‘The Red’ was a Cissokho himself; and before him, Cissokhos stretched back to a vanishing point beyond history. Seckou’s grandmother, Bintou Konte, also came from a griot family.

Most of Seckou’s uncles and grand uncles – Jali Mory, Jali Messing, Jali Solo, Jali Aliou, Jali Fily, Jali Sadio, Jali Maher – either lived in his compound or just nearby. Music and griot lore enveloped Seckou on all sides. They called him Seckou jali n’ding: ‘Seckou, the little griot.’

The family knew they had something in Seckou: a talent, even in griot terms. When he was toddler, his grand uncle Jali Mory, the man who built the first 28-stringed kora, looked at him one day as he crawled about the yard and noticed that his hands looked strange. They were small but fine and dexterous, like the hands of a skilled adult. “The kid better watch for those fingers,” he declared. But Jali Kemo was especially hard on the little Seckou, to the extent that, even as a boy, he began to wonder why.

“He wasn’t as strict to his own kids,” Seckou remembers, “And as I grew up it became a serious problem. Like – this isn’t right! He’s stopping me doing what I want to do! He’s guarding me everywhere I go! I wanted to discover other things. I was very stubborn and I resented him at times.”

It was only much later, with the onset of wisdom, that Seckou realised his grandfather was trying to protect him from all the traps that were laid out for stubborn young musicians just like him: drugs, alcohol, stuff like that. “The wisdom of those old people,” he says, “they’re really good at seeing what might happen to their kids. I wanted to discover other things and he was frightened of people taking advantage of me.”

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Granted, his livelihood had been reduced to a pile of charred wood and ashes, and so had some of the tools his father and grand-father had used on the Terra Nova, the ship that had taken Captain Scott on his fateful journey from Cardiff docks to Antarctica in 1910. Scott died in the snow and ice. The children were all dead too. But he was alive. Keep going. There was nothing else but to do. Just keep going.

Friends and neighbours donated materials and goodwill; John Weston Thomas picked himself up and carried on. He rebuilt his workshop and started taking in orders again. He had a mission, clear and energising: to revive harp making in Wales. He’d arrived at it by a scrappy circuitous route. After training as a carpenter and joiner, he joined the merchant service at the beginning the war, and had gone back to his chosen trade after V-Day. He was a practical joker. On one building site, a worker left his trowel out while he went off for his lunch break. In less than hour John Thomas had fashioned a tiny replica of it. “What’s this?!” gasped the worker when he came back. “Well, you shouldn’t leave your tools out in the rain should you?” answered John, to general guffaws.

John Thomas acquired a taste for making miniatures. His work was dazzling in its accuracy and detail. A full set of tiny tools won him a silver medal at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Then a complete set of orchestral instruments was commissioned by a collector. Of all the instruments he fashioned, he was most taken by the little Grecian harp. He was a Welshman and the harp stirred him somewhere deep.

After a time spent teaching in London, he came back to his native Cardiff and did all kinds of advanced wood work, building sets for the BBC and models for local museums. But the harp kept tapping on his shoulder. “You know,” he said to his wife Joan, “I wouldn’t mind making harps. “Well, look!” she answered, “either do it or shut up!” Behind every great man…

So, in the mid 1960s, he set about it. There were hardly any harp makers left in Wales, and not that many harps either; at least, none other than those grand curlicued affairs that aped the regency splendours of the Érard pedal concert harp. John Thomas had to go to the Welsh Folk Museum and study the old harps there with his keen eye: triple harps, double harps, ancient one-row harps. He rooted about for knackered old instruments that he could take apart, just to see how they were constructed. He dug deep into the archaeology of the instrument.

There had once been many harp ‘luthiers’ in Wales; men like John Richards of Llanrwst in Snowdonia, who was harpist to Queen Charlotte in the mid 18^th century. The little hill-circled village with its old humpbacked bridge was the centre of harp making for at least two hundred years before the industry faded out in the late 19^th century. The few Richards triple harps that survive are objects of refinement and beauty. If you felt expansive, you could even say that John Richards something of a Welsh Stradivarius.

One of Richards’ pupils was Basset Jones of Cardiff, who became a protégé of the fearsome Lady Llanover of Llanover Court near Abergavenny. He made at least three dozen brand new harps in the early to mid 19^th century and had the privilege of presenting one of them to the Prince of Wales. Later, one of Llanover Court’s two ‘in house’ luthiers, a carpenter by the name of Abram Jeremiah, was possibly the last harp maker to work in Wales. That is, before John Thomas decided to revive the art. Lady Llanover herself, a born-again ‘Wales-o-phile’ of the most ardent type, deserves high praise for keeping the Welsh harp out of the morgue, where it seemed inexorably bound in the late 19^th century.

John Thomas, no relation at all to Queen Victoria’s harpist of the same name, was never without a smouldering pipe between his lips. Some glowing ember or an unextinguished match was probably responsible for the fire that ravaged his workshop in the autumn of 1966. Two weeks later disaster struck at Aberfan. For a while, every Welsh men and women lived with the bitter taste of grief and death in their mouths. They mourned as a nation for the coal-black misery of their brow-beaten past; they railed at God and the Coal Board. That terrible memento mori, together with plenty of gruff passion and courage, put John Weston Thomas back to work. The business grew and he took on apprentices.

One of them was Alan Shiers, a young woodworker from a neighbourhood in the Cardiff docks with the enviable name of Splott. Down in the docklands of Alan’s post-war youth, music was a kind of social glue. His whole family sang or played an instrument, without ambition, pretence or stress. It was just something everybody did. “I didn’t realise it then, but there was a sort of social belonging that only music brings,” he remembers. “Everybody would be dancing in the streets at New Year’s Eve. And I just felt – wow! This is it. You’re either playing the music, or making the tools to play it. Culturally, the people who make the instruments are a kind of forgotten band of brothers really.”

After working as an organ-restorer’s apprentice (“Organs were on their way out. They became ‘vestrified’”), then a boat builder (“just cheap labour”), then doing voluntary work in India and youth work in Cardiff, Alan was on the look out for a piece of rosewood one day, to make a bridge for his guitar. One of the teenagers at the youth club where he worked knew John Thomas and offered to take Alan round to his workshop.

“He was a bit of crusty character,” Alan tells me. “At our first meeting, this lad introduced me: ‘He’s looking for a bit of rosewood.’ ‘What?!!’ Mr Thomas replied, ‘I’d save the sawdust of rosewood. It’s very precious timber!’ Anyway, he delved into his store and came up with this piece of wood about so long. And I said, ‘Oh no…I don’t want all that!’ ‘You’re not having it!!!’ he said.” At which point Alan mimics his old master’s look of stern rebuke and cracks up at the memory. “‘I’ll give you six inches and you save the sawdust,’ was what he said and then I must have messed it up. I’m pretty sure of that.”

Alan ended up working as John Weston Thomas’ apprentice for five years. “I realised that I’d landed with somebody I’d been looking for since I was fifteen,” he says, “but I was 23, so mature enough to appreciate it. When you’re at school you just think learning is learning. But then…if you think education is expensive, try ignorance instead…isn’t that right?”

Alan had found a “gem”, the last in line of the old traditional woodworkers. There was a circular saw in the workshop, but that was about it. Everything else was done by hand. “I’ve had to unlearn some of that stuff,” he admits. But above all, despite the low wages, the stress of deadlines and all the rest, it was the camaraderie of the place that made those years so rewarding: John Thomas dressing up as Long John Silver in the oily old rags they used for polishing; or swigging water from a bottle clearly marked ‘METHS’ whilst smoking his pipe and talking to some trembling visitor; or leaving little piles of gunpowder around the shop and casually tossing his lit match on one, just to see it go bang and scare the living blazes out of Alan or anybody else who happened to be about him at the time.

“We could never make enough harps, because we were making them by hand,” Alan says.  “And sometimes he refused. I remember some bloke going on and on at him, and I thought ‘Mmm, he’s very quiet. Normally he’s chirping.’ So this bloke says ‘When’s it going to be ready then John?’ You had to call him Mr Thomas. Mr T, was as I close as I ever got to familiarity. ‘Well…it’s never going to be ready for you,’ he says. ‘I don’t like your face!’ Ha ha ha! You know, the Sales department would have shot themselves!” Alan laughs again at the memory but then, still wearing his smile, he quietens down before adding, “it was such a lovely place. You smelt the wood and you smelt the shavings and John would come over with some Welsh cakes. If you were in, boy, you were in.”

The post FINDING THE ONE (extract) – Meths, gunpowder and the revival of harp making in Wales appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

“I have now to add a list of their music instruments,” Park wrote, “the principal of which are – the koonting, a sort of guitar with three strings; the korro, a large harp with eighteen strings; the simbing, a small harp with seven strings; the balafou, an instrument composed of twenty pieces of hard wood of different lengths, with the shells of gourds hung underneath to increase the sound;…” The list goes on.

The uniqueness and value of Park’s account derives partly from the fact that he was the first white European to cast his eyes on whole swathes of land that are deep in the West African interior (and the first be able to confirm that the Niger River flowed west to east, thus resolving a geographical dispute that had lasted a century or more); and also partly to the fact that his was the first written portrayal of those lands. Africa, of course, has its own historians; but until recently, they carried their histories around in their heads, never on paper, transmitting them only in long spoken or sung epics that travelled no further than the ears of the audience seated in front of them. Their accounts are equal, if not, greater in value than Park’s. Their concept of history is also quite different. To them, history is not a fixed and rigid thing, an ultimate truth to be revealed slowly with painstaking research, but rather a story, a tale, that is constantly fed by family and clan imperatives, by the need to praise great men, by the vagaries of collective memory and the slow maturing of myths and legends.

In the collective mental archive of all these oral historians, the circumstances of the kora’s birth are richly varied. Some say that the instrument dates back to the 13^th century and was invented by the great and powerful king Sumaoro Kante, the man who was beaten at the battle of Krinia in 1235 by the greatest warrior and ruler West Africa has ever known: Sundjata Keita. Others say that it was Koriyang Musa, Sundjata Keita’s personal griot or bard who invented the instrument.

Others, like the modern Gambian griot Bamba Suso, whose version of the great Sundjata epic was transcribed and subsequently published by Penguin Classics in the 1970s, thereby becoming a kind of ‘fixed’ standard version of the story, also attributes the advent of the kora to Koriyang Musa, but with an important twist.

Here are some of the opening lines of Bamba Suso’s oration:

This tune that I am now playing

I learned it from my father,

And he learned it from my grandfather.

Our grandfather’s name – Koriyang Musa.

That Koriyang Musa

Went to Sanimentereng and spent a week there;

He met the jinns, and brought back a kora.

The very first kora.

Let’s set aside the conundrum that if Koriyang Musa was really Bamba Suso’s grandfather, then he must have lived in the 20^th rather than the 13^th century! What’s important here is Bamba Suso’s conviction that the kora was given to mankind by the djinns; in other words, the spirits.  On that ‘fact’, almost all of west Africa’s oral historians agree.

It makes sense. The best music always comes from the other side. The kora may be a manmade tool but it’s more than a spade, a hoe or an axe. Humans can channel their soul, all their feeling and their awareness of every immaterial force that governs their lives through the strings of a kora. In other words, to put it more poetically, with a kora they can commune with both their own and other spirits, especially those of nature. All music is a gift of the spirit for the spirit by the spirit. Depending on your degree of monotheism, the same could be said of the spirits plural. Yes, the spirits gave the kora to men and women and you only need allow a little poetry and metaphor into your world to understand that and accept it as fact.

The most common kora-birth story goes like something like this: A man called Jali Mady Wuleng – Jali Mady ‘The Red’ – was walking through the bush one day. Griots tended to travel a great deal, because part of their job was to fulfil ‘missions’ for their patrons or masters, often involving longs journeys to other cities and lands to solve all manner of contentious issues and disputes. Whilst walking on his own, Jali Mady heard this wonderful motion-stopping music and, looking round about him, found a spirit sitting in a hollowed out tree playing an instrument he’d never seen before. It looked a bit like the various harps that already existed in Manding society – the three-stringed bolon, or the seven-stringed simbin – but it was much larger, grander and more sophisticated than any of those, and it had twenty-two strings in all. Jali Mady used his considerable bardic skills to persuade the djinn to part with his kora, which it eventually did. And so the kora came to mankind.

(c) Andy Morgan 2013.

Extract taken from ‘Finding The One: The strange and Parallel Lives of the West African Kora and the Welsh Harp’ (Theatr Mwldan / Astar Artes 2013)

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[pp 41-45] The Festival in the Desert and the advance of Islamism in the north

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Mokhtar Belmokhtar aka Laouaar aka Monsieur Marlboro aka One Eyed Jack

The following is an extract from my forthcoming book Kel Tinariwen – A Saharan Odyssey. The context is a visit I made to Tamanrasset in southern Algeria in January 2010, where I stayed with Eyadou Ag Leche, the bassist of Tinariwen. Obviously, the story of AQIM has evolved substantially since then but for present purposes I’ve decided to keep the context intact and limit this extract to the period 1990-2007.  I made no reference to subsequent events such as the Touareg uprising of January 2012, the alliance of Touareg Islamist leader Iyad Ag Ghali with AQIM, the Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 or Belmokhtar’s dramatic hostage grab at the In Amenas oil refinery in January 2013.  I will be bringing the story up to date before publication, but in the meantime, I hope this offers some useful background today’s dramatic headlines…

Out in the yard of Eyadou’s house, we talked about the Great Game that had gripped the southern Sahara. We asked all the usual questions in the eager hope that Eyadou might be able to throw some light on them. Who exactly are Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb?  Why are they allowed to operate in northern eastern Mali? Why has the Adagh, the home of Tinariwen and their ancestors, become a bolt-hole for terrorists and their hostages?  Are AQIM involved in the drug trafficking trade?  Do they have links with the Touareg in the area?  Or with local Arabs?  Are they an invention of the Algerian secret services?  Are they in cahoots with the Malian government?  Is the President of Mali involved in drug trafficking? How come a Boeing 727 can land in the desert, unload up to ten tonnes of coke into a waiting convoy of 4x4s and then get torched without the local authorities intervening or even raising the alarm? Many questions spiralled in and out of each other like eddies of sand.  It was as if our vision of the whole problem ended at the tip of our noses.

Eyadou didn’t know the answers either. Not many people know the answers, and those who do aren’t the type to blithely spill the beans over a good lunch. Terrorist emirs, Malian secret service operatives, corrupt local politicians, Saharan drug barons, Algerian generals, politicians in Bamako, Touareg rebel leaders in Kidal, arms dealers from Tamanrasset and Timbuktu, Mauritanian customs chiefs, none of them are the most garrulous conversationalists and raconteurs, especially if they happen to be talking to a western journalist who’s asking too many questions.

There are facts about Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) that are reassuringly hard and verifiable. The organisation exists. It’s run by Algerian Arabs. It’s made a home from home in the north east of Mali, on Tinariwen’s native earth. It earns millions and millions of euros from kidnapping westerners. No one knows exactly how much. Every now and then it chops the head off one of its victims. All in the name of Allah.

But beyond that solid core of certainties floats a penumbra of intrigue and supposition, a mist of conspiracy theorising that turns AQIM into a mystery with the power to obsess, like the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster or the grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas. And beneath all that speculative hot air, the people of the deserts, the Kel Tinariwen, languish in misery. Many of them live the truth, a daily gritty unglamorous truth that armchair theorists and analysts cannot know. But most live without knowing the geopolitical mechanisms behind that truth. They know their desert is dying. They know that rain is rarer than it was, that the government 1,500km away in Bamako has abandoned them, that the basics of civilization – schools, clinics, sustainable energy, a functioning economy, welfare – are absent from their lives, and that tourism has been killed by foreigners, i.e Algerian Arabs, in the name of Islam.  But why?

In the early 1990s, the small cabal of army generals who had wielded real power in Algeria since independence found themselves unpopular at home and isolated abroad. The anger and resentment of ordinary Algerians against these shady strong men and their party, the FLN, the only party in this one party state, had reached breaking point by the middle of the 1980s. Inspired by the Berber Spring of 1982, feelings exploded into a inflammable display of people power in October 1988. This popular uprising, an ‘Arab spring’ un-fêted and largely ignored by the rest of the world, lead directly to Algeria’s first free multi-party democratic elections in 1991. The first round of the ballot, held in late December 1991, gave an unassailable lead to an Islamist party called the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamic du Salud or FIS in French). But the generals decided that they couldn’t risk handing power to a party that considered democracy itself to be an unIslamic western apostasy. Islamist dogma held that power can only come from God, not the people, and that democracy itself is therefore ungodly.   The general’s dogma held that power was theirs, by right and privilege. The two dogmas were incompatible and so the generals cancelled the second round of voting, which was due to be held in late January 1992.

This spectacular abortion of the democratic process soiled the image of the Algerian leadership in the eyes of western democracies such as France and the USA. Back home, its effect was catastrophic. Fury cooked the nation’s heart. Some Algerians came to the conclusion that the generals, the ruling FLN and their entire rotten system of power had to be annihilated by any means necessary. Anyone with a stake in that system would have to be punished for robbing the nation of its dignity and its freedom. The generals tried to appease the popular ire by importing a new leader in the shape of Mohammed Boudiaf, a hero of the struggle for independence who had been exiled to Morocco for opposing President Ben Bella in the early 1960s. They installed him as temporary President in January 1991 but the move turned out to offer little more than a flicker of light in a storm of emotion that refused to abate. Boudiaf was assassinated six months later by a sub-lieutenant who belonged to an elite security unit affiliated to the Algerian secret services.

Gradually, throughout 1991, the hope that the Algerian people had placed in democracy mutated into gross civil disobedience, bloodshed and guerrilla war. The more radical elements in the FIS took to the hills and formed a number of different Islamist militias who vowed to continue their struggle for an Islamic state by violent means. Most of these home grown jihadists were clear that their enemies were the state, the army and the police. They considered the targeting of civilians to be haram, a sin. Hearts soon hardened however, and vengeance grew colder, a process that accelerated with the return of Algerian men who had fought with the mujahedeen against the Russian army in Afghanistan during the 1980s and others who went there to do a stint in the new Islamist training camps in the 1990s. Collectively, these ‘pros’ were known as Les Afghans and they were responsible for introducing ever more lethal guerrilla tactics as the decade went on.

The Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armée or GIA) was formed by one of these Afghans, a man called Mansour Meliani, in the summer of 1992 and it soon became the most feared and powerful terror organisation in the country. It vowed death to all heretics and unbelievers, who, by their definition, meant not only the government, the army and the police but also journalists, writers, artists, musicians, academics, commentators, intellectuals, opposition politicians and countless entirely innocent civilians. In their polarised vision of the world, almost the entire Algerian population was guilty of complacency and ‘co-operation’ with the government, and thus were legitimate targets for their bullets and bombs. Eminent cultural figures like the rai singer Cheb Hasni and the writer Tahar Djaout were killed by GIA mujahedeen.

The FIS soon tried to alienate themselves from the GIA by forming their own Islamic Salvation Army (Armée Islamique du Salut – AIS) in order to conduct jihad in what they considered to be the ‘proper’ and ‘moral’ way. The GIA then became more bent on fighting the FIS, the AIS, and the old Islamist militia, the Armed Islamic Movement (Movement Islamique Armée – MIA), than the Algerian army or police. The political intrigue and blood-letting within the jihadi movement became murderous and complex. By the end of 1994, the GIA was under the command of the bloodthirsty Djamel Zitouni, whose ambition was to refocus some of the GIA’s brutal power directly on France, Algeria’s hated ex-colonial overlord. He masterminded the highjacking of Air France Flight 8689 in Algiers on Christmas Day 1994, intending to fly it into the Eiffel Tower. He also sent mujahedeen to plant bombs on the Paris Metro, killing many innocent civilians. But the suffering of foreigners was nothing compared to that of Algerians themselves.

After Zitouni was killed by a splinter group in 1996, the GIA was taken over by Antar Zouabri, a man with an even greater thirst for innocent blood. He espoused the notion that the entire Algeria population were guilty of heretical behaviour, by their docility, their moral depravity and their aspiration to democracy. Religious guidance was sought from the Jordanian preacher and jurist Abou Qatada, then based in London, who issued a legal judgement or fatwa in 1995 which claimed that the killing of innocent women and children was justified if they had converted from Islam or were ‘apostates’.  Abou Qatada and the GIA espoused the extreme Kharijite doctrine of takfir, whereby entire groups or populations of Muslims are declared to be unbelievers, sinners and apostates and therefore condemnable to death under Shari’a law. This was the judgement which lead to the killing of over 100,000 innocent Algerians. Even though, by 1997, the GIA had begun to fall apart under the weight of its own internal cat-fighting and frequent purges, the carnage it perpetrated during Algeria’s dirty war of the 1990s has been well documented and lamented. By the middle of the decade, not only the level of violence, but its sheer inventiveness and depravity had plumbed unimaginable depths.

GIA recruitment policies were famously lax, and the organisation was soon burdened not only with large number of petty criminals turned opportunistic jihadists, but also by undercover government agents. The theory soon began to emerge that early in their campaign of terror, armed Islamic groups, especially the GIA, had been infiltrated the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (DRS), aka La Sécurité Militaire (SM), aka the Algerian secret services. The general whisper was that shadowy forces in the government were in fact responsible for instigating some of the inhuman acts outwardly committed in the name of jihad. The stench of conspiracy was reinforced by the testimony of former DRS agents who ‘turned’ and sought asylum abroad, where they revealed some of dark machinery of power that operated within Algeria. The finger was often pointed at the head of the Algerian secret services, General Mohammed Mediène, aka ‘Tewfik’, one of the most secretive figures in the Algerian military high-command, and, together with General Smain Lamari, the real power in Algeria.

Whether or not their struggle was partly puppeteered from above, by 1997 many GIA foot soldiers, and some cadres too, were tired and dismayed with the brutality that their leaders, especially Antar Zouabri, seemed happy to continue inflicting on a bruised and battered Algeria. One of these GIA leaders, a former army paratrooper and commander of the GIA’s eastern sector, Hassan Hattab aka Abou Hamza, broke away with other dissidents and announced the formation of a new organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (Groupe Salafist pour le Predication et le Combat – GSPC), in March 1999. Hattab defined the group’s enemy strictly and narrowly as the army and the state. Killing innocent civilians was forbidden. This new direction attracted thousands of defectors from both the GIA and the AIS, and GSPC numbers soon swelled to over 3,000 fighters. Osama Bid Laden was alleged to have given the project his blessing. GIA tactics had proved too extreme even for the don of global jihad.

The horror in Algeria had become overwhelming. The generals and the FLN government confessed to have realised that military victory against the insurgents was an impossibility and a more conciliatory approach was required. Between 1995 and 1998, President Lamine Zeroual issued numerous decrees of clemency and pardon which persuaded over 4000 Islamist fighters to lay down their arms. In April 1999, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a 62 year-old FLN cadre who had the backing of the army, was elected President on a platform of national reconciliation. A law known as the Concorde Civile was passed in September 1999, offering a general amnesty that persuaded many more GIA grunts to come in from the cold. Further pardons were granted in 2005 by The Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation which was approved by the people in a referendum. The nation was sick of violence and a large proportion of the Islamist movement began to turn away from Semtex and the Kalash’ towards the ballot box and other forms of non-violent opposition.

Only the GIA and GSPC spurned all peaceful overtures and vowed to keep on fighting until their dream of an Islamic caliphate in Algeria became a reality. But by the turn of the millennium, a combination of battle fatigue, conciliatory government policies and successful army and police operations against Islamist militias was slowly re-establishing law and order in the north of Algeria. The GSPC decided to seek new battlefields in areas where the government’s grip was still limp. They also wanted to implement a new ‘internationalist’ agenda, and bring their movement in line with the objectives of the global jihad. Representatives of the GSPC had travelled to Pakistan in 1998 to attend a meeting organised by Osama Bin Laden in an attempt to unite disparate groups of mujahedeen around the world into one global Islamist front. The predominant doctrines that united these groups were Salafism and Wahabbism.

The Salafists preach a return to the pure and unsullied moral principles of the as-Saaleh as-Salaf, the ‘righteous originators’, those first Muslims whose life and moral rectitude is admired and venerated by modern adepts. It’s a kind of religious nostalgia that looks back to what it imagines was a complete, unified and morally clean doctrine for living that held sway in the years immediately following the death of the Prophet but had since been corrupted and tarnished. Some claim that Salafism is actually a rather modern concept cobbled together by scholars in the Asian subcontinent at the end of the 19th century to free young Muslim minds from the chains of colonialism and bind them to a strict interpretation and application of the Qu’ran and hadith, or body of Muslim law. Since then, ‘Salafis’ has become something of a catch-all adjective used to describe any Muslim who vows to impose Sharia law and an unadulaterated Islamic way of life on an unwilling society by peaceful, or, if necessary, violent means.

An early proselytiser for a return the pure life of the as-Salaf was Mohammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century Arabian preacher who wrote the highly influential Kitab at-Tawhid or ‘Book of Oneness’. His ideas became entrenched in the Arabian peninsula and were adopted by the House of Saud in the early 20th century. Despite their love of material excess and their warm relationship with the USA, the Saudi royal family and princes from Qatar and other Arabian principalities have been among the chief funders of Salafism and Wahabbism throughout the world. Their money has helped to build mosques and madrassas in North and West Africa and fund the activities of Salafists. The GSPC were Salafists through and through, and they began to believe that they would be better off signing up to a worldwide movement of similarly minded mujahedeen, rather than continuing to fight their corner in Algeria alone.

New leaders emerged to challenge Hattab’s tenure as the overall emir or leader of the GSPC, especially after Hattab had tried to distance the movement from Al Qaida and its brazen violence against civilians following the 11th September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Furthermore, many men in the movement considered Hattab to be a weak leader, lacking in total commitment and unable to produce sufficiently horrifying and headline spawning results. Most prominent among these new dissenters were three men; Abdelmalek Droukdel aka Abu Mousad Abdel Wadoud, a graduate in mathematics and one of the GSPC’s most talented bomb makers, Nabil Sahraoui aka Mustapha Abou Ibrahim, one of the most admired and revered militia leaders in the GSPC, and Amari Saïfi aka Abou Haidara aka Abderrazak El Para.

The debate raged around the question whether the GSPC should be fighting a battle for the soul of Algeria or the soul of the entire world. In other words, were the Algerian generals the ultimate target, or was it America, Israel and ikufar or unbelievers and apostates throughout the globe. Droukdel, Sahraoui and Saïfi wanted the organisation to be part of a global jihad, modelled on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Hattab however still thought of the FLN and the Algerian state as the main enemy. In the end, the internationalists won the argument. Hassan Hattab was forced to resign and Nabil Sahraoui, “a towering minaret and courageous hero” according to the GSPC website, became the new emir in August 2003. In May 2004 he released a communiqué entitled “The War on Foreigners”, in which he vowed vengeance against Zionists, crusaders and the apostate regimes of the Arabo-islamic world. He also announced a plan to start attacking foreigners on Algerian soil. Less than a month later, he died in a hail of bullets near Akfadou in the Kabyle mountains. The copiously bearded Abdelmalek Droukdel took his place as the new emir.

A key matchmaker in the looming nuptials between the GSPC and Al Qaida was a Yemenite called Abdel Wahid Ahmed Alouane, aka Abou Mohammed al Yemeni, who visited the GSPC on many occasions in the early years of the new millennium as Bin Laden’s special envoy in North Africa. Following the US invasion in 2003, Bin Laden knew that Afghanistan’s days as the ideal training ground for the global mujahedeen were numbered. Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman az-Zawahiri, were looking for another part of world in which to base their operations. The Sahara seemed to offer a number of advantages as a theatre for jihad; weak government control, remote hiding places, porous borders, corrupt officials already tainted by their involvement in smuggling, a poor and therefore pliable population and a thousand unwatched desert tracks on which to flee beyond the reach of the security forces. It was also the ideal pad from which to further the Al Qaida project in Africa, a continent which Bin Laden deemed most propitious for his hardline vision of the future.

After a few particularly bloody seasons, the GSPC leadership began to accept that they weren’t exactly winning hearts and minds in Algeria’s north. Their tactics were simply too brutal, and too damaging to the human and material capital of the country. The support of the populace, so essential to any guerrilla insurgency, was increasingly sporadic and begrudging. Moving south and targeting foreigners seemed to be a wise diversionary tactic, which would hopefully ease the bruised sensibilities of ordinary Algerians in the north and tap in their deep-seated resentment against France in particular and whites in general, who had been bogeymen in the general conscious ever since the debasement of the colonial era and the brutality of the war of independence.

The two GSPC emirs in charge of Algeria’s southern and eastern sectors at the turn of the millennium, Abderrazak El Para and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, had already been active in the Sahara and Sahel for a few years. By ‘active’ it should be understood that the pair indulged in a range of activities, not all of which were inspired by the divine call to jihad. A large part of their time was spent smuggling. Belmokhtar was an archetypal Saharan smuggler and had been since his early teens.

Terrorism and insurgency, which involves feeding and arming many hundreds of full-time fighters, is an expensive business that needs a constant supply of black cash. During the 1990s it was relatively easy to raise the necessary funds by appealing to Islamist pockets worldwide. In the places like Saudi Arab and Qatar, those pockets were extremely deep. Apart from large donations from Middle Eastern princes, emirs and business, contributions were sought from the faithful in mosques, madrassas, universities, clubs and societies from Paris to Peshawar and Detroit to Djakarta. A complex network of Islamic charities, associations and banks was set up to channel these funds from the donors to the mujahedeen in far-flung parts of the world. However, after 9/11, the ease with which this money could fly backwards and forwards across the globe was severely diminished by new laws prohibiting the funding of terror.  Other means of generating cash needed to be found.

The GSPC involved themselves in the more lucrative end of the trans-Saharan smuggling game, namely cigarettes, second hand cars, illicit petrol, weapons, illegal migrants and drugs. Arms purchased in Northern Mali, Libya, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and countries further afield, were used to fight jihad or secessionist rebellions in Algeria and Mali. There was no dearth of stock. Small weaponry, from hand guns to automatic rifles and RPGs, often of Russian and East European manufacture, had flooded into West Africa during many forgotten wars of the previous decade. Tobacco, a favourite cash cow of armed insurgencies around the world, was a good earner. Marlboro cigarettes or other pirated brands could be snapped up cheap in the ports of West Africa, especially Lomé and Cotonou, and then smuggled north through the desert to Algeria’s mediterranean coast and on into Europe. The stringent duties payable in many north African and European countries on legally imported cigarettes made the black-market trade very profitable.

Unemployment, corruption and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa were also the root causes for an ever more lucrative trade in people. Poor African migrants on an epic search for a better life were loaded up onto trucks on the southern perimeter of the Sahara and transported north by people traffickers before being dumped and left to their own devices in the coastal towns of Algeria, Morocco and Libya. Finally there were drugs. Hashish was purchased from growers in the Rif mountains of Morocco and carried south through Mauritania and Mali, and then west up through Niger, Egypt, the Middle East and up into Europe via Turkey and Balkans. Cocaine was also beginning to trickle into the desert, but not yet in the quantities that were later to shock the world.

Smuggling has been around in the southern Sahara for as long as trans-Saharan caravan trading has existed, in other words, since time immemorial. The transport of goods from north to south across the Sahara and vice versa is the prerogative of desert people, most notably the Arabs, or Moors, and the Touareg. Members of certain families and clans are caravan traders almost by birthright, and the desert road is in their blood. Nice distinctions between the legality and illegality of different types of cargo matter less to these traders than to the distant governments under whose authority they are supposed to operate. After all, one man’s legitimate desert caravan is another man’s train of contraband. Dates, palm oil, ostrich feathers, ivory, salt, slaves, gold, cars, Marlboro cigarettes, ghetto blasters, transistor radios, fake Rolex watches, cooking oil, pasta, powdered milk, sugar, jeans, diesel, petrol, hashish, second hand cars, illegal migrants, weapons, cocaine; whatever the cargo, it’s always just been a question of supplying demand and earning a living. Without caravanning and smuggling, the Saharan economy, such as it is, would have collapsed long ago.

In bygone colonial and pre-colonial times, trans-Saharan trading was often dominated by large Arab families and clans, especially the Chaambi from the Tidikelt, the Ahl Azzi of the Touat, the M’zabi of the Ghardaia region, the Berabiche clans who lived in the deserts north of Timbuktu and the Kounta who lived on the eastern shores of the Niger bend, north of Gao. These families would trade across the desert with each other, turning the Sahara into one unified economic, social and cultural space. Their activity created links and ties that have survived and gradually mutated into the trading or smuggling networks of today. As British anthropologist Judith Scheele’s superb work on the subject, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (African Studies) so ably explains, the Sahara works on quite different economic and spatial principles than many other parts of the world. A trader in Adrar in the Touat might have closer family and clan ties with people in Timbuktu or Gao that with his immediate neighbours. Not only trade goods, but politics, religion, tribal loyalty, power and influence are determined by those ties, making the Sahara one of the most complex regions in the world to understand. This economic and social unity of the Saharan space also explains why the borders imposed on the region at the end of the colonial era were so problematic to livelihoods and connections and so often despised by desert people.

As the 19th century drew to a close, there was a large influx of Arabs from Mauritania into the deserts north of Gao, many of whom came to fight for the Kounta in its wars against the most powerful Touareg confederation at that time; the Iwellemeden. Many of these Mauritanian Arabs settled in the area and formed a distinct sub-tribe known as the Tilemsi Arabs, who became vassals of the Kounta and paid tribute to them. The descendants of these Tilemsi Arabs have become successful businessmen, smugglers and livestock herders, whose networks stretch far north and west into Algeria and Mauritania. In recent decades, smuggling hasn’t just been the get-rich-quick solution for the ‘lower class’ Arabs of the Tilemsi and Timbuktu regions, it has also been a means of securing political, social and tribal independence from their former masters. This process has been accompanied by deep and often severe social strain and political upheaval.

Nowadays Algeria, with its soft currency and its strictly controlled or ‘closed’ import and export policy, is a paradise for smugglers. Travel through Morocco and everyone wants to sell you something. Travel through Algeria and everyone wants to buy something from you. The Algerian state imposes ludicrous restrictions on the movement of basic food stuffs and livestock across its southern borders. Only second-rate and barely edible dates seem to be allowed through without hindrance. And yet, almost everything that goes into peoples’ bellies in Kidal and Gao has been smuggled into Mali from Algeria, whether it’s pasta, sugar, powdered-milk, flour or couscous. And the flow south of other essentials, including petrol, is constant and unstoppable. In such an environment, black economies thrive and provide ample opportunities to make, and loose, fortunes.

But smuggling isn’t only about money. It provides an answer to the soulful yearnings of the desert man. It’s a way of regaining pride, of pitting your wits, your courage and your physical strength against nature and against the oppressive control of distant States. It’s a way of becoming a young man of means, fit to marry one or even more wives from ‘good’ families, an asset to family and tribe, a ‘true Arab’ who feels pride in his heart. The smuggling road leads to independence and freedom, both of the pocket and the spirit. It allows a young Arab or Touareg to feel good about himself and his world once again, after decades of drought, of degradation, of rebellion against the state, of social change and collapse. Speeding across the lunar flatness of the Tanezrouft, behind the wheel of a powerful boulboul or Toyota Landcruiser HG60, at 120 kmph, with money in the pocket, payload in the back and eyes firmly fixed on the horizon, is a dream so much more powerful than anything else the Sahara can offer a 16 year old youth. It beats sitting around in some distant desert villages, penniless, wifeless, hopeless. It’s a dream of freedom.

Neither the GSPC, nor the GIA before them, actually controlled the trans-Saharan smuggling rackets. The Saharan emirs or militia leaders often came from a smuggling background and were well versed in the ways and wiles of the trade.  But the notorious smuggling dons of the 80s and 90s, men like the drug lord Ahmed Zendjabil aka El Chelfaoui aka The Pablo Escobar of Algeria or Tamanrasset’s smuggling lynchpin Hadj Bettou, weren’t necessarily Islamists. They were simply businessmen and mafia godfathers with enormous power. Hadj Bettou is suspected by many to have instigated the successful plan to assassinate the interim President Mohammed Boudiaf in 1992. Boudiaf vowed to ‘clean up’ Algeria in general, and Tamanrasset in particular.  Big mistake.

Terrorists and traffickers the world over co-exist in the same murky underworld. In the Sahara, family, clan and tribal links often bind together the smuggler, the Islamist mujahid and the agent of the State – whether a policeman, a customs official or an army officer – in one large and geographically far flung network of self-interest and self-preservation. It’s not that the presence of the state is necessarily weak in the distant border areas of southern Algeria and northern Mali, it’s just that what state officials do operate there are often more interested in making sure that in the daily struggle for security and advancement, the interests of their family and their clan aren’t overlooked.

If drug lord or people smuggler wants to transport his cargo through an area controlled by Islamists, then a brown envelope stuffed with protection money is handed over. If some impoverished army officer at the barracks in Tamanrasset or Timbuktu needs to earn a little extra on the side by selling a few surplus semi-automatic weapons and rounds of ammunition then he can just call the man from the GSPC. If a mafia boss wants to secure a more long term advantage then he can fund an Islamist group on a regular basis, just to keep things clean and stable.  That’s how the cogs of underworld turn. Other examples of insurgency and crime sharing different sides of the same coin are plentiful: The Taliban in Afghanistan and the heroine trade, Colombia’s FARC and cocaine, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge and precious gems or rare wood, the IRA or ETA and narcotics or weapons, the Kurdish PKK and narcotics…the list goes on. What’s happening in the Sahara fits a well established global pattern.

Terrorism and smuggling meet in the figure of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, aka Khaled Abou El Abassa, aka Laaouar, ‘the one-eyed’, who is something of a Bin Laden, Scarlet Pimpernel and Al Capone all rolled into one; a desert boy, born and bred in Ghardaia, Algeria, who was “seduced”, in his own words, by jihad and especially by the writings and recordings of the Palestinian Abdallah Azzam. In his teenage years he travelled to Afghanistan to receive training in Al Qaida camps near the city of Jalalabad and it was in Afghanistan, so he claims, that a piece of Russian shrapnel robbed him of an eye. Belmokhtar returned home in the early 1990s and became the Mr Big Stuff of southern Algeria’s smuggling rackets, forging strong links with arms, drugs and people smugglers and befriending various Touareg and Berabiche tribal leaders in the process. He even married one, or possibly several Berabiche Arab girls from Timbuktu and once declared that he would like to ‘retire’ to northern Mali when his hustling days are over. He also joined the GIA soon after its inception and then left with Hattab to become part of the GSPC in 1999.

By the turn of the millennium, Belmokhtar had risen up the ranks to become the GSPC’s emir of zone 9, the southern beat that comprised most of Algeria grand sud, the open southern deserts so enticing to the inveterate criminal smuggler. In the early naughties he collaborated with Abderrazak El Para, then the emir of zone 5, the eastern zone, on refocussing GSPC operations further south, but the pair soon fell out, jealous of each others’ power. Whereas El Para ventured into ill-advised waters by seeking to buy arms in Chad and eventually got himself caught and extradited back to Algeria, Belmokhtar, with unfailing shrewdness of judgement, has evaded capture for more than two decades. The French security services call him l’inssaisisable, the ‘uncatchable’. Whilst his current rival at the top of AQIM’s Saharan hierarchy, Abou Zeid, is reviled for his brute cruelty and appetite for chopping the heads off his kidnap victims, Sahara watchers often regard the one-eyed Belmokhtar aka Monsieur Marlboro with a grudging respect, recognising his relative restraint in the treatment of hostages and his nose for a good deal. Many are convinced he’s only in it for the money and always has been. “Belmokhtar will kidnap, rob or smuggle anything for anyone,” a silver-haired Saharanist once said to me, “so long as the price is right.”

In 2003, the GSPC katiba or ‘militia’ lead by Amari Saïfi aka Abderrazak El Para kidnapped thirty two German, Swiss, Austrian and Dutch tourists in southern Algeria. This spectacular coup launched Islamic terrorism in the southern Sahara, an area that had hitherto been spared the worst excesses of Algeria’s horror. El Para, as his nickname implies, was a one time para-commando and captain of special forces in the Algerian army who had trained with US Green Berets in Fort Bragg and elite troops in Russia. He then served as bodyguard to General Khaled Nezzar, minister of Defence and one of the seven senior generals, or salopards (‘arseholes’) as GSPC fighters liked call them, who rule Algeria. He deserted the Algerian army not once, but twice, joining an armed Islamic terror group each time. His last desertion dated back to 1997, when he joined the GIA and then the GSPC under the leadership of Hassan Hattab. He soon emerged as an able man in the field, and a contender for Hattab’s crown. But the incident that clinched his fame was, according to the ‘official’ account at least, the result of an accident.

In February 2003, El Para and the men in the katiba el Maout, were still basking the ‘success’ of their spectacular ambush of an Algerian army column near Batna in the Aurès mountains, which had claimed the lives of over forty paratroopers. In order to make himself and his men scarce, El Para decided to travel south and buy some weapons in Niger. The katiba was crossing the remote desert near Illizi, a small town north of Djanet in the depths of the Algerian Sahara, when it happened to chance on a group of Swiss and German tourists who were indulging in some deep desert rough riding on all-terrain motorbikes, without a guide. Or so the story goes. El Para kidnapped the tourists and proceeded to lay his hands on a further five separate groups of European adventurers who had the misfortune of being in the Algerian Sahara and within the reach of El Para’s men in those months of February and March 2003.
After the final tourist had been captured, and a large number of Land Cruisers and dirt bikes requisitioned by the terrorists, El Para found himself in charge of a total of 32 hostages; sixteen Germans, ten Austrians, four Swiss, one Dutchman and a Swede. They were held captive in two completely separate groups, several hundred kilometres apart. El Para enlisted the help of Belmokhtar to guard them. A group of 16 hostages who had been captured in March were freed only a few months later after a bizarre ‘non’ battle with the Algerian army near Djanet. The other fifteen were held in the remote Tanezrouft desert and then taken south into Northern Mali, to a secret camp somewhere near Tessalit, the birthplace of Ibrahim and Hassan from Tinariwen. By the end of August, all but one of the hostages had been freed. Michaela Spitzer, a middle-aged German women, died of heat exhaustion and other desert maladies on the long trek from Algeria to Mali, and was buried in the desert.

El Para’s haul generated about 5 million euros in ransom revenue and cemented a relationship of sorts between the GSPC, the military security establishment of Mali, certain leaders of the Touareg rebellion, Arab army officers and business men and other key hustlers in the southern Sahara. The fatal agreement of the German and Swiss governments to pay a ransom established an irresistible economic case for further kidnappings, with disastrous consequences for the region and its relationship with the outside world. From that moment, tourism, an important means of livelihood for hundreds and thousands of Touareg, began to die a slow death. The doors of the desert creaked shut, slowly, inexorably. In the meantime, the GSPC used their ill-begotten lucre to buy more sophisticated weaponry, faster cars and the hearts and minds of more young recruits.

After numerous chases across vast expanses of desert with US special forces in hot pursuit, Aberrazak El Para was captured by the Chadian rebels of the MTDJ and kept prisoner in north western Chad, hidden away in the remote Tibesti mountains, until he was eventually handed over to Libya and then extradited back to Algeria. Since then, he has been the subject of a veritable judicial farce involving abortive and inconclusive trials in his native country. For many years after his return to Algeria in October 2004, he was kept in secret locations under the surveillance of the DRS, during which time he was tried in absentia and sentenced to death by an Algerian court. How the law of a land can find a man guilty in absentia when that country’s own security services are holding him in their custody is beyond baffling. Only recently, in 2011, was he transferred to a more ‘regular’ prison in Serkadji. His definitive trial for numerous crimes of terrorism, which include not only the 2003 kidnappings, but also the murder of seven French monks at Tibhirine  in 1996 (subject of the famous film ‘Of Gods and Men’) and of the paratroopers in the ambush near Batna, has yet to take place.

In reaction to this increase in terrorism and illicit trans-border activity, the US government declared a new front in the Sahel under the umbrella of Operation Enduring Freedom, their global war on terror. In 2004 the Americans set up the Pan-Sahel Initiative (PSI) to funnel training and equipment to the armies of Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad, in order to help establish specialist anti-terror and anti-crime units tasked with taking on and defeating both the Islamic terrorists and the traffickers. The PSI mutated into the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) in 2005, with a wide-ranging five year programme and a budget of half a billion dollars. Algeria, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia were brought into the field of play and anti-terror and anti-crime bases began to be established with American backing all over the southern Sahara and Sahel, including several in the Kidal region of north-eastern Mali. White men with army crew cuts were seen travelling through the desert in convoys of new 4×4 vehicles, or wandering nonchalantly around Kidal’s central market. US Army transport planes landed on Kidal’s dirt air-strip.

The Americans were convinced that the Sahel was becoming a crucible for anti-western terror groups inspired by Islam. Pondering the anti-american topography of the globe, they noticed that a huge contiguous swathe of central Asia, east and west Africa was becoming ‘radicalised’, from Afghanistan, through Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Palestine and Yemen, into Africa via Somalia, the Sudan and across finally to Niger, Mali, Algeria and Mauritania. With that strategic and remote point of view so favoured by intelligence analysts and their political clients, this banana shaped chunk of earth was seen as a homogenous battleground, with each territory within it linked to the others by dark and hostile forces.

Tinariwen’s home region of the Adagh in north eastern Mali, right in the middle of the banana, was deemed especially significant in this struggle against terror. The Touareg from this region had long been categorised as ‘trouble-makers’ by governments and security heads, ever since the rebellion of 1963. The uprising of 2006 only confirmed this. Furthermore, a proselytising missionary organisation called the Tablighi Jama’at, who preached an uncompromising return to piety and the core tenets Islam had been active in the Adagh for many years, building mosques, organising social welfare at a grass-roots level, and charming political and tribal leaders with their vision of purity and the pursuit of religious excellence. The GSPC, who had begun to use the Adagh as a convenient rear-base, over the border and beyond the reach of the Algerian security apparatus, were also digging their claws into Adagh society, making alliances with local communities and leaders, and ’sweetening’ this desperately impoverished corner of the desert with their ill-gotten gains. The Saharanist Baz Lecocq also points out that the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, physicist Abdul Kadeer Khan, had become a fan of Mali’s northern deserts, and had bought himself a house in Timbuktu. Just over the border in Niger were the uranium mines of Arlit, from where, according to false information given to the Pentagon, Saddam Hussein had obtained the uranium for his weapons of mass destruction. There were huge as yet unexploited deposits of the mineral all over northern Niger and Mali.  This coincidence of dark and threatening circumstances was, for the Americans, a ‘no-brainer’.  And yet there were brains, and very good ones at that, who disputed the logic of American policy.

Professor Jeremy Keenan is a controversial figure in the global community of Saharanists. The bluff old English anthropologist once had an enviable reputation, rare for an anglophone academic, as a specialist on the Kel Ahaggar Touareg of southern Algeria. Despite a number of books and treatises by German, Danish, Dutch, Italian and American historians and anthropologists, the academic study of the Sahara has mainly been a francophone preserve.  Keenan’s seminal works The Touareg, People of the Ahaggar (1973), Sahara Man: Travelling with the Touareg (19??) and The Lesser Gods of the Sahara: Social Change and Contested Terrain (2004) are respectable mainstays of the Saharan bibliography. Then, in 2003, according to some of his fellow academics, Keenan ‘lost the plot.’  Or did he find it?

Fascinated by the 2003 hostage crisis, he became convinced that El Para was in fact, an agent of the DRS and that entire kidnapping episode had been masterminded by the black ops stooges of the Algerian secret services, with the approval of the CIA. Their aim was to concoct a high profile terrorist outrage, of sufficient magnetism to hypnotise the international media, and thereby provide a dramatic headline-grabbing premise for the USA to increase its military presence in the Sahara and Sahel. Whether by pure coincidence, or by some darker chain of cause and effect, it was indeed in the wake of El Para’s hostage grab that the USA began the implementation of various large scale military-security initiatives in the Sahel. The result is that US influence in the Sahel, and especially in Mali and Mauritania, has increased exponentially, and military ties of a seemingly deep and enduring nature have been cemented with with the regional powers.  What’s in it for the Americans?  Well, according to Keenan and the conspiracy theorists, it’s all the usual unholy grails:  Security, influence, oil and blocking the Chinese take over of Africa.

For Professor Keenan, going public with this enticing conspiracy theory represented a leap out of hard-edged factual academia and into the murky world of supposition. The change was reflected perhaps in the fact that he chose to publish his first article on the subject, entitled ‘Building Castles in the Sand: US Military Basing in Algeria’ (Review of African Political Economy, Dec 2003) under the engaging pseudonym of Mustafa Barth. Keenan then resumed his habitual identity and published numerous lengthy articles exploring the obscure whys and wherefores of his theory, which he eventually summarised in his book ‘The Dark Sahara’, published in 2009.

But Keenan wasn’t the only one to smell a desert rat. Algerian journalists like Salima Mellah and Salima Tlemçani have also written extensively about DRS involvement in terror groups, and about the many unanswered questions that still hover around the 2003 hostage crisis. Frenchmen, like the terrorism consultant Alain Chevalérias and François Gèze, the CEO of Éditions La Découverte, also support the notion of DRS collusion with the GSPC and AQIM.  In fact, a sizeable body of French and Algerian writers, journalists, analysts and obsessives continue to uphold the idea that El Para was a DRS man through and through. They see nothing surprising or outrageous in the claim. After all, cases of collusion and manipulation of Islamist groups by the Algerian secret services during the ‘dirty war’ of 1990s are legion. El Para was a ‘special ops’ man in the Algerian army before he allegedly became an Islamist. Join the dots and this was just more of the same.

For these doubters, there’s too much about the 2003 hostage crisis that doesn’t chime. According to the hostages themselves, far from being the result of happenstance, the kidnappings seem to have been prepared in advance, although clearly not that well. Soon after their capture, they were taken to secret bases in the desert, already stocked with food and provisions, along specially prepared tracks. Their captors, who didn’t seem to know the desert or its climate very well, were never short of provisions. Where did these provisions come from and who supplied them?  The hostages saw Algerian army helicopters flying near the base, almost on a daily basis, and were perplexed as to why their location hadn’t been discovered and they hadn’t been freed. El Para issued no ransom demand for months and the GSPC itself never actually claimed any official responsibility at all for the kidnappings. The GSPC had never taken western hostages before. It just wasn’t their style. Why now?

After the initial kidnappings, a bizarre silence reigned around the whole affair, both nationally and internationally, at least until mid April.  The first group of 17 hostages were freed near Amguid only three days after the German foreign minister, Joska Fischer and the head of German intelligence paid a high level visit to Algiers. The ‘light skirmish’ that took place during the Algerian army’s assault on the camp seemed, according to several hostages, to have been staged.  All the debriefings of hostages in Algeria were conducted by the DRS and not the army or police. Back in Germany the hostages underwent further interrogations, this time by the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German criminal investigation police.  Several hostages were astonished to be shown photos of their captors by the BKA, photos that were recently taken, at ground level.

By mid June, the second group of 15 hostages were being held in remote mountain range north west of Tamanrasset. Although they had been in captivity since mid February, El Para had yet to issue a formal ransom demand. He asked a french speaking hostage to help him write a letter to the Swiss and German embassies in Algiers, but it contained nothing except a rather verbose outline of the GSPC’s general aims and philosophy. El Para himself was often absent from the group, leaving his fellow jihadists perplexed and ignorant of his purpose or whereabouts, feelings which became the cause of increasing frustration among the katiba’s foot soldiers.

Towards the end of June, El Para came back to the camp and lead the entire group south into northern Mali, an arduous and often waterless journey that cost the life of Michaela Sptizer. By mid july, a full five months after the kidnapping of the first hostages near Djanet, El Para was finally in contact with the German Embassy in Bamako to begin formal ransom negotiations, albeit amid much confusion and uncertainty. During the negotiations, various Malian mediators including Touareg rebel leaders like Iyad Ag Ghaly, Alhaji Ag Gamou and Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, or northern Arab strong men like Colonel Ould Meydou and Major-Colonel Lamana Ould Bou, were tasked by the Malian government with leading negotiations.

The question of what alliances were then formed and what promises were then made is the subject of enduring and irresolvable debate between Sahara heads and conspiracy theorists. What’s certain is that from this moment onwards AQIM acquired a ‘home from home’ in the north east of Mali, a safe haven in which the terrorists could while away the hours and days with their hostages whilst the business of ransom negotiation was pursued. With a couple of rare if significant exceptions, AQIM have never actually kidnapped their victims on Malian soil.  They’ve only brought them back to Mali for safe-keeping. And with the equally rare exception of a major clash north of Timbuktu in July 2009, in which 28 soldiers were killed, the Malian army have never actually lead a full frontal assault on Al Qaida.

These two facts alone have lead many conspiracy theorists and almost the entire Touareg intelligentsia at home and abroad, to conclude that Al Qaida were invited on to Malian soil by the Malian government in order to the discredit the Touareg nationalist movement and mask the illegal trafficking going on in the north, from which a number of middle-ranking and senior Malian officials were drawing hefty amounts of black cash. In the atmosphere of anti-Islamist paranoia that seized the world following the 9/11 attacks, it was expedient for any government to twist the international image of a recalcitrant separatist movement and pass it off as an Islamist terror one instead. The strategy masked the true nature of the separatist struggle, confused international opinion and secured almost immediate benefits in the form of better diplomatic and security ties with the USA and Europe, more military aid, both in money and in kind. That’s what happened in Mali in the years following 2003.

The problem with the theory of collusion between AQIM and the Malian government is that no firm evidence has ever been produced to back it up. No one has actually photographed or recorded a Malian army officer or secret service agent chatting with an Al Qaida emir, or taking possession of a fat brown envelope full of narco-cash in some distant corner of the northern deserts. Of course, that’s the nature of this shadowy world. Nothing is ever written down. Dirty deals are done behind closed doors, or on an impossibly remote sand dune right in the middle of nowhere. The north of Mali has been closed to outsiders, especially journalists, for years.  AQIM money is carefully laundered through various banks and legitimate businesses in Mali, Niger, Mauritania and further afield. Or it’s used to buy huge herds that chomp happily on the pastures of the north, away from the prying eyes of the world. There are no witnesses on record because there has never been any proper investigation. And even if there had been, who would risk their skin to expose skullduggery at such high levels. Fully uncovering the matrix of villainy that has been choking Tinariwen’s homeland since the beginning of the millennium presents a journalistic challenge that would make Watergate look like an episode of Miss Marple.

At the moment, all it can ever boil down to is one enormous hunch, a devil’s choice between a damning and a marginally less damning scenario. At best, finding AQIM on their territory, the Malian government just left them there to fester, knowing full well that their presence would putrefy the social fabric of the northern deserts. They did this because they didn’t want to risk Malian lives by taking fight to the terrorists, and / or because there were Northern Arabs in the Malian army and secret services who had strong family and cultural ties to AQIM and encouraged its presence on Malian soil because it provided an effective screen behind which they could continue with their high-stakes smuggling. Furthermore, AQIM’s presence in the north east would sully the Touareg independence cause with the taint of Islamic terrorism, an especially apt consideration following the Touareg rebellion of May 23rd 2006. At worst, all of the above is true, except that instead of waking up one morning and finding them there, the Malians actually invited AQIM to come and establish their iniquitous presence on this once open and welcoming land. That Malian policy towards AQIM should have been quite so cynical might come as quite a surprise to many. Diplomats at the US Embassy in Bamako were certainly quit taken aback when, in October 2006, a key official in the Malian Ministry of Territorial Administration told them that hostilities between the GSPC and the latest in a long line of Touareg rebel movements, the ADC, worked to the government of Mali’s advantage. Following clashes between the Touareg rebels and the GSPC, the terrorists had vowed to wipe out the ADC leadership. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” stated the Malian politician. Exactly how friendly, he refused to say.

On August 18th 2003, El Para’s remaining fourteen hostages were finally handed over to the Malian authorities and driven back to Bamako via Gao. Their ordeal was over. The Americans ‘honoured’ El Para by conferring the title of “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” on him, one normally reserved only for the “most wanted” of jihadis, including Osama Bin Laden. A court in Karlsruhe, Germany, issued an international arrest warrant for El Para, but neither Germany nor the US made any real attempt to bring him to justice. No due and proper police investigation or judicial process was ever conducted against El Para and his men, either in Algeria or Europe. After the hostages returned home to Europe, some of them seemed to display the partial effects of Stockholm Syndrome and spoke about the strangely warm and amicable relationships they had struck up with some of their captors, referring to them not as brutal terrorists, but almost as friends, much in the same way that a desert tourist might remember his or her guide after the Saharan trip of a lifetime. It seems that one of the GSPC men even gave the hostages his personal mobile number, and that a year after their release, some of the hostages were still in touch with him.
Whatever the mission or the alliances that motivated El Para in this affair, the German government committed a grave and unpardonable error in the opinion of many when they handed over their huge ransom to El Para and his men. Kidnapping now had form and precedence in the criminal sub-culture of the region, and it was adopted as a strategy of choice by an Islamic insurgency who had never indulged in it before. It became the fast-track to cash par excellence, far more effective than cigarettes, arms, drugs and protection rackets. And what’s more, it had the immense advantage of generating huge international publicity and sowing fear in the hearts and minds of western infidels. It was win, win and double win.

The great El Para kidnap of 2003 begs questions and attracts speculation like flies to a carcass. But maybe it should be taken at face value. The hostages confirmed that their kidnappers were fanatically devout, and obsessed with all the usual jihadi obsessions:  the moral failures of western civilisation, the evil of America, the ‘Great Satan’, and its zionist plot to support Israel and rob the Arab world of its freedom and dignity, the heinous crime of fighting a new crusade against the muslim brothers in Kuwait and Iraq, so near the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, the crimes committed against Muslim brothers in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and Palestine. All the usual stuff. And far from serving the DRS or the CIA, perhaps El Para was merely out to replenish the GSPC coffers. Kidnapping westerners – the killer cash machine.

And yet, despite all these core and fringe benefits, it was to be another five years before AQIM kidnapped another westerner. That fact alone gives pause to wonder. In January 2004, just six months after El Para released his final hostages, the third Festival in the Desert took place amidst the talcum white dunes of Essakane, 60 kilometres due west of Timbuktu, the Malian home of Mokhtar Belmokhtar and many of his Arab Berabiche allies. At least five hundred westerners made their way along the appalling track that links Timbuktu and Essakane, often getting bogged down in the soft sand for hours, even days. In terms of kidnapping potential, we were a turkey shoot. Not only that, but the very presence of a horde of westerners dancing, carousing and revelling in the pure white sands of a Muslim Sahara was surely in itself an unpardonable affront to the Salafist principles of the GSPC. But no band of GSPC desperadoes touting AK47s ever appeared. Not a single solitary bearded preacher or fanatic reared his head to disturb our revels. The atmosphere was open, generous, tolerant, as it always had been in Mali.

The same thing happened in January 2005 and 2006. During those years I travelled with scores of others – French, English, Italian, American, German, Dutch – to see Tinariwen, bombing up to Kidal, Tessalit, Aguel’hoc, Anefis and Gao without a care in the world apart from running out of petrol or missing the flight back home due to a broken axel. Only a few years later, this area was to become the red zone, the off-bounds fiefdom of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb which was deemed suicidal for a westerner to visit. But until 2009, despite El Para’s introduction of the kidnapping business into the region, tourism thrived in Mali’s north east in a state of prelapsarian innocence.

That’s not to say that the GSPC went to ground entirely in those intervening years.  After the capture of El Para in Chad in March 2004, the GSPC slowed down their Saharan activities and went through a period of reorganisation. The 9th zone, which had been under the total control of Mokhtar Belmokhtar for some years, was split into two katibat, the katiba Al Moulathamoun, under Belmokhtar’s command, and the katiba Tarik Ibn Ziyad, aka Fatihin, under the command of Abou Zeid. The GSPC were also strengthening their international ties, especially Al Qaida in Iraq. The GSPC leadership had been impressed by the ‘successes’ of Abou Musab az-Zarqawi’s campaign of terror in Iraq between 2004 and 2006. In May 2005, Abdelmalek Droukdel issued a communiqué through an intermediary in which he requested support from his fellow mujahedeen in Iraq for his own struggle in North Africa. A few months later, a letter written to az-Zarqawi by a senior Al Qaida executive proposed an alliance between Al Qaida in Iraq and the GSPC, but not before their ideological strength and trustworthiness had been thoroughly checked. Intriguingly, the Al Qaida leadership still had a suspicion that the GSPC was heavily infiltrated by the Algerian secret services, a hunch that dated from the bad old days of the GIA. Nonetheless, the GSPC continued to followed az-Zarqawi’s exploits in Iraq with admiration and a certain amount of envy, especially when az-Zarqawi kidnapped and then executed two senior Algerian diplomats in the summer of 2005.

The GSPC’s thirst for moral cleansing and infidel blood was sharpened by the arrival of US troops in Mauritania, Mali and other countries in the Sahel from 2004 onwards. The mujahedeen saw this opening of a new battlefront in the US-lead war on terror, right on their doorstep, as a delicious provocation. Delicious, because they now felt part of a global rather than merely local struggle. In the autumn of 2005, the GSPC issued a proclamation that glorified this widening of the battle. “O young men of Islamic Maghreb…” it began, “from Egypt to Mauritania, Algeria to Nigeria, and the remainder of Muslim minorities in Africa. Many of you were unable to go to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Chechnya… However, Allah has brought those evil people to your own homelands… This prolonged and exhaustive war that was begun by Cheikh Usama Bin Laden is starting to bear fruit… This is your chance to erase colonial borders…that were established surrounding our Islamic countries and turning them into prisons ruled by various oppressors who have trampled on our religion and defended our enemies…therefore, demolish those borders. O young Muslim men, travel to the battlefields and attack the fortresses of the criminals and their supporters…Our war against the crusader American enemy is closely linked to the wars of our Muslim brothers around the world. [We] will be another brigade to join the brigades of holy jihad manifested by the holy attacks on New York and Washington under the leadership of Usama Bin Laden.”

The call was being answered in the Sahara; both the Tariq ibn Ziyad and the Mouthalamoun brigades saw increases in their fighter numbers in this period, although neither ever exceeded a couple of hundred. The GSPC was mutating into transnational enterprise. Algerians, Malians, Nigeriens, Nigerians, Moroccans, Libyans, Mauritanians, Burkinabés, Senegalese, Guinéens, Ivory Coasters, Beninois joined up to the cause in a sombre rainbow of ardent young hearts. These youth, often barely past their mid teens, were often recruited in mosques and Qu’ranic schools, seduced by inflammable speeches on grubby cassettes or videos of mujahedeen in Iraq and Afghanistan blowing up US army convoys and giving the Satanic west a bloody nose. Sometimes they promised the chance to fight for Allah in these distant lands, but ended up somewhere under the Sahara sun, as unforgiving as their own born-again spirit. Stripped down, the basic attraction of jihad was simple. It offered opportunities to young men who otherwise had none at all; opportunities to travel, to earn a little money, to carry arms, to defend Islam, to feel a part of something large, important, purposeful. Youth needs opportunity and in lands where poverty, displacement, war, corruption and social degradation have destroyed all most opportunities, it’s a case of take whatever comes along.

The GSPC now needed a major coup to prove the combat readiness and effectiveness of these new southern brigades. For the next major outrage following the 2003 kidnappings, they turned their attention to Mauritania, a country that had hitherto been spared the whip of Islamist violence, and launched an attack near Lemgheity, an outpost of impossible remoteness in the far north east of Mauritania, 400 kilometres east from the mining town of Zouérate. You’ll find it hard to get hold of a map that even recognises Lemgheity’s existence. On the fourth of June 2005 about one hundred and fifty mujahedeen sporting battle fatigues and black cheches attacked a Mauritanian army convoy near the village, killing fifteen soldiers and wounding seventeen more. Belmokhtar and his Mouthalamoun brigade were later revealed to be responsible for this strike. His declared aim was to punish Mauritania for having diplomatic relations with Israel and for cultivating alliances with the Great Satan.  Three days later, the US led ‘Operation Flintlock 2005’ against terrorism in the Sahel was launched, with the arrival of up to 1000 US military personnel in Nouakchott. Another red rag to the conspiracy bull.

In April 2006, a GSPC convoy carrying arms through the desert south of Ghardaia attacked a unit of Algerian customs men and killed thirteen of them. The army responded swiftly and heavily, killing a number of GSPC fighters and recovering a trawl of weapons, bought in Niger and destined for northern Algeria, that included: 1 x heavy machine gun, 6 x RPGs, 1 x mortar canon, 4 x RPK machine guns, 59 x automatic machine guns, 15 hand pistols, 311 ammunition chargers, 53 mortar shells and 16 cases of ammunition. Mokhtar Belmokhtar was reportedly behind the attack but, as always, he evaded his pursuers and simply disappeared into the desert.

Meanwhile, the links that El Para, Belmokhtar, Droukdel, Nabil Sahraoui and others had been forging for years had borne fruit. In late 2006, on the ultra-symbolic date of September 11th, Ayman Al Zawahiri, Al Qaida’s no. 2, announced that the GSPC was now officially aligned to the global jihadi franchise. The GSPC pre-empted Al Zawahiri’s announcement with a communiqué released a few days his announcement. “We swear allegiance to Cheikh Ousama Ben Laden,” it read. “We will pursue jihad in Algeria. Our fighters are under his orders so that he might strike who he wants where he wants through our intercession… We advise our brothers in all the other jihadi movements, everywhere in the world, not to miss this blessed union. Al Qaida is the only organisation able to bring together all the mujahedeen, to represent the Islamic nation, and speak on its behalf.”  In a separate posting, Abdelmalik Droukdel claimed that “God ordered us to be untied, to be allied, to cooperate and fight against the idolaters…the same way they fight us as military allies and in economic and political groupings. Why shouldn’t we join our brothers while almost all these nations have united against Muslims and separated them, dividing their land, and taking away their Al Aqsa mosque. These crimes are committed by the Jewish-Crusader alliance.”  Unity…oneness…tawhid. After so many years of division, of in-fighting, of isolation and internal strife, all the mujahedeen of north Africa would now be united in one struggle, one jihad, under the banner of Al Qaida, in the service of the ultimate goal, an Islamic caliphate, not only in Algeria, but in all the Muslim lands of North and West Africa. Jihad in North Africa was now ‘fit’ for the new globalised millennium.

A few months later, in January 2007, the GSPC changed its name to Tanzim al-Qa’ida fi-Bilad al-Maghreb al-Islam or The Al Qaida Fighting Group in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb. The title quickly contracted to the more portable AQIM or AQMI in the Francophone world, a big nightmare with a little name. The GSPC and Al Qaida leaders hoped that the group would eventually incorporate the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (MICG), the Libyan Islamic Combatant Group (LICG) and the Tunisian Islamic Combatant Group (TICG) into one structure, headed by the GSPC emirs. It was a classic efficiency drive, a rationalisation of disparate entities in the service of greater synergy and success, the kind of process that any management consultant might be proud to foist on a client. It was accompanied by a snappy new website, which proved that the Algerians were learning lessons from their more media and marketing savvy Al Qaida partners.

The last attack perpetrated by the GSPC before they rebranded themselves AQIM occurred on 10th December 2006. Two buses carrying employees of Brown Root & Condor, a joint venture between the Algerian state oil giant Sonatrach and the US firm Halliburton, were blown up as they drove from the wealthy suburb of Bouchaoui back to the Sheraton Hotel in Algiers. An Algerian driver and an American employee were killed. At the time, Brown Root & Condor was implicated in a vast and juicy scandal involving massive overpayments for goods and services, often of American provenance. The company had been distributing the proverbial bulky brown envelopes, stuffed with thousands of dinars and dollars in kickbacks and inducements to senior personnel in Halliburton and Sonatrach as well as the wider military, security and energy communities for years. Brown Root & Condor, which was founded back in 1994, was the nodal point in a tight relationship between the military-industrial complexes of America and Algeria which grew steadily throughout the 1990s and then flourished like a shameless bougainvillea following the attacks of September 11th, 2001. The US security establishment realised that no one in world had more experience of the dark arts of fighting terrorism than Algeria and its DRS, and the Algerian security establishment was only to happy to provide their powerful new friends with information, expertise and lucrative procurement contracts.

2006 had been a relatively light year in GSPC annals. 2007 however was bathed in blood. It started with the detonation of seven bombs at police stations in the Boumerdès and Tizi Ouzou districts of northeastern Algeria. In March AQIM attacked a bus carrying employees of Stroitransgaz, the Russian firm that was building a gas pipeline from the fields in south west of the country up to the Mediterranean coast.  One Russian and three Algerians were killed.  Matters degenerated from there on.  Scores and scores of people, both security personnel and civilians, died in AQIM attacks in Lakhdaria, Batna, Dellys and Algiers. Kidnapping also flourished in the north. Capturing men of wealth, or members of their family, and cashing them in for fat ransoms became a work-a-day pastime. In 2007, there was at least one kidnapping incident a day in Algeria, although, interestingly, none of the victims were European or American. This was thanks in part to the assiduous security measures that were taken to protect foreign business men, workers and tourists. Overall, it was one of bloodiest seasons in the history of the troubles. But none of the violence touched the southern Sahara until the end of the year.

On Christmas Eve 2007, François Tollet, a 73 year old retired chemist from the Charentes area of France was driving south on the road between Aleg and Maghta Lahjar, about 250 kilometres south east of Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. With him in the car were his brother Gérard, his two grown up sons Jean-Philippe and Didier, and a childhood friend of Didier’s, Adda Hacène. They had stopped by the side of the road for a picnic lunch when three turbaned men drove up in a black mercedes, got out and demanded money. When the tourists refused to hand over their cash, the assailants took out AK-47 rifles and killed four of them; Tollet’s two sons, his brother and his friend. Only François Tollet survived the attack, although he was severely wounded in the leg.

Tollet had long been a fan of Africa and the desert, and had travelled there almost on a yearly basis. How cruelly the desert betrayed that love. Or had it always been misplaced? Do desert lovers like Tollet swim in the rose-water of its seemingly endless hospitality, its generosity of space and time, the sweet calmness of its sunset hour. Are they blind to the human struggle that goes on in the Sahara every day, the poverty, the corruption and the anger, the nurseries of violence and extremism. I’ve often pondered that question. Maybe Tollet has too. This was the first time he had taken his two sons along with him on one of his African road trips. To see them murdered with his own eyes, in cold blood, by the side of a lonely desert road, in an immensity of sand and rock stretching to a wide and level horizon, must have been like a punch in the gut from a fist that had once belonged to a friend.

The Mauritanian authorities were quick to lay the blame for the attack at the door of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. But this knee-jerk attribution was treated with suspicion by some in Mauritania. “I don’t believe in the terrorist attack theory,” a local journalist told The Figaro newspaper, “The GSPC men could more easily have struck in the tourist region of the Adrar if they had wanted to carry out a big coup.” Three men were eventually arrested in Guinea Bissau thanks to an operation reportedly masterminded by French intelligence. One of them, Sidi Ould Sidna, then escaped from the Palace of Justice in Nouakchott before being recaptured by Mauritianian security forces in April 2008. He was only 21 years old. Another jihadist, Maarouf Ould Haiba, an ex soldier and petty criminal, was already behind bars, having admitted taking part in the killing. “I killed those French miscreants,” he told the Mauritanian court.

The attack on Tollet and his family took place over two thousand kilometres away from Tinariwen’s homeland in north eastern Mali. There was a palpable fever of insecurity at the time but that was as a result of the recent Touareg uprising and not Islamic terrorism. Then, on February 22nd 2008, a full five years after El Para’s hostage coup, the strange hiatus in the Islamist kidnapping game came to an end. Wolfgang Ebner and Andrea Kloiber, a tourist couple from Salzburg in Austria, were kidnapped as they were exploring in the Matmata region of south eastern Tunisia, close by the Algerian border, an area famous for its caves and the troglodyte hotel which starred as the original home of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars IV.

Ebner and Koiber were reportedly captured by the Tarik ibn Ziad katiba of AQIM, lead by the dreaded Cheikh Abdelhamid Abou Zeid.  Abou Zeid was born Mohammed Ghadir, sometime in the mid to late 1950s, no one knows exactly when. His family belonged to the Chaamba, originally a nomadic tribe that roamed with their herds between Debdeb and El Oued in the far eastern corner of Algeria, near the Libyan border. Abou Zeid’s spent most of his youth looking after the family goats and camels and occasionally attending Qur’anic school. Life was hard, but the young diminutive shepherd, whose nickname was “P’tit” (“Little’un”) was tough and resourceful. He was also steely, stubborn, and prone to violence if contradicted. By his early twenties, he already owned an old Land Rover and had started to smuggle goods, especially tea and cooking oil, along remote desert tracks that crisscrossed the nearby frontiers. The open desert tracks were to him like the sky is to an eagle. He was a loner, ascetic and austere, who abjured the pleasures of alcohol and cigarettes, although not necessarily women, of whom he married four by the end of the decade.

Over time Abou Zeid became a notorious smuggler, a status that earned him a few stints in the El Oued prison. Abou Zeid himself didn’t consider his activities to be criminal, just necessary for a decent life, and most of the youth of the Debdeb area shared his outlook. He even went on pilgrimage to Mecca twice during the late 1980s. His religious faith began to play a central and unforgiving role in his life. Abou Zeid’s strengthening zeal fused with an increasing hatred of the police, customs officials and border guards whose job it was to inhibit his ‘honest’ trade, galvanising eventually into a steely view of the world, streaked with a profound disgust for the political corruption, cronyism and moral degeneracy of modern Algeria. Thanks to his sweat, his courage, his cunning, Abou Zeid had escaped the pecking misery of his youth to become wealthy and independent. No one was going to steal the fruits of his hard labour from him.

When the FIS emerged as the torch bearer of anti-government fervour in the early 1990s, they found a willing recruit in Abou Zeid. He began to propound the imposition of Sharia law as the cure-all remedy for Algeria’s sins and became an active benefactor, distributing alms and food to the poor of Debdeb, especially during Ramadan. His faith was ardent and sincere, although he found the verbal niceties of political and spiritual debate hard to master, a weakness which blocked his path into mainstream politics or religious leadership. This lack of erudition left a void that fuelled envy and resentment against intellectuals who could spin words and ideas beyond his grasp.

In 1994, Abou Zeid was arrested and imprisoned for giving material support to terrorist groups. The charge wasn’t too far off the mark. Using his intimate knowledge of the secret pathways of the desert, Abou Zeid had been smuggling arms into Algeria from Libya and further south, and selling them on to the small terrorist groups who were already beginning to operate in the Sahara.  He was sentenced to three years in jail.  Prison was a school. Abou Zeid not only absorbed the violent fervour of the other mujahedeen who were locked up with him but he also learnt the tricks of jihad. On his release in 1997 he went underground, below the radar, with a brother and two uncles, joining a GIA katiba operating in the El Oued area. Its leaders had already been his associates in the clandestine supply game, and Abou Zeid was given the role of keeping his katiba stocked with guns, bullets, petrol and food. In 1998, he was sent on a mission to find new sources of arms further south, and he spent the next few years travelling throughout southern Algeria, Libya and northern Mali and Niger, cementing solid business relationships with traffickers, corrupt officials and bent army officers. If Mokhtar Belmokhtar was already enthroned as the King of the Saharan Islamist smugglers, Abou Zeid earned a reputation as the crown prince during those years.

After Hassan Hattab’s defection from the GIA and the creation of the GPSC, Abou Zeid found a natural ally in Abderrazak ‘El Para’, the new emir of the southern 5th zone. El Para made this tough resourceful man his lieutenant and kept him in his inner circle, until he decided Abou Zeid was ready to lead his own cell, the katiba Tariq Ibn Ziad. Its first mission, in 2002, was to prepare  for the planned expansion of jihad south into the Sahel and black Africa. The scene was set for the great hostage crisis of 2003, in which Abou Zeid played a crucial supporting role. His activities in the years between 2003 and 2008 are vague and barely known. However, with the kidnapping of Ebner and Kloiber, he returned to forefront of terrorism in the Sahara and has remained there ever since.

After their capture, the two Austrians were driven through Libya and Algeria and into northern Mali, where they were held in a secret base north of Kidal. It was Ennahar, an Algerian newspaper that has close links with the DRS, that published a list of the five prisoners that AQIM wanted freed in return for the lives of tourists in early March 2008. It included Amari Saïfi aka El Para, who was still being held by the DRS at the time, despite the fact that he had already condemned to death by an Algerian court.

A number of mediators were involved in the negotiations to free Ebner and Kloiber. One of them was Ibrahim Mohammed Assalegh, a Touareg member of the Malian national assembly. He spent months shuttling back and forth between Bamako and the far northeastern corner of the country, where the hostages were being held, although he claims he never actually met anyone from AQIM itself. He left that job to a well known smuggler and border hustler called Mahmoud Ag Mohamed, who came from In Khalil, the border town set up surreptitiously by the Algerian authorities as an ‘market’ for contraband traffic of all kinds. In Khalil isn’t the kind of place you’d ever want to spend a two week holiday. Think of it as a desert version of Dead Man’s Gulch, a lawless little burgh out in the middle of nowhere, a sinkhole of clandestino dreams built out of mud and sweat, a place to import, export, hand over, receive and then get the hell out as quick as humanly possible.

Assalegh and another Touareg bigwig, a former government minister called Mohamed Ag Erlaf, worked with the Malian secret services on a plan to persuade local nomadic groups to put pressure on Al Qaida to free the hostages. The nomads in question included Reguibat tribesmen from the Western Sahara, who Assalegh encountered in the far north of Mali, around the salt mines of Taodenni. He refers to them simply as ‘Polisario’, since the Western Sahara’s independence movement is largely made up of Reguibat. He urged all the nomads he met to help Mali free the hostages. If they didn’t, he argued, they might get caught in the crossfire of a war between the Malian army and Al Qaida. To Malian soldiers from the south, a man in a cheche is a man in a cheche, and differentiating between nomad and terrorist is testing, if not impossible.  The nomads in the north were also promised new wells, which were probably never delivered.
Apart from Assalegh and Ag Erlaf, several northern Arabs, or Berabiche were also involved in the negotiations to free Ebner and Kloiber. This group had the backing of Libya, who provided cash, vehicles, satellite phones and other essentials. Why would Libya be interested in helping a couple of kidnapped Austrian tourists?  Why, thanks to the warm friendship between far-right Austrian politician Jorg Haider and Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, of course. The desert cultivates strange relationships. Among the Arab team was Major Bou Ould Lamana, a native of Timbuktu who worked for the Malian secret services or DGSE and was a protégé of Colonel Mamy Coulibaly, the Malian secret service supremo. Ould Lamana was also suspected to have been involved in arms trafficking and selling weapons to the GSPC as far back as 2001. The US Embassy called him “The Saharan version of a bent cop.”

Ould Lamana was part of a coterie of northern Arab army officers, political officials and business men who wielded enormous influence and power. They were dons in northern Malian smuggling rackets, and their networks stretched far and wide through West Africa and the Maghreb. Chief among this group were Colonel Mohamed Abderrahmane Ould Meydou, a handsome brick-chinned officer who was one of the Malian army’s ‘desert foxes’, charged with keeping a semblance of government control in the lawless northern provinces and thumping recalcitrant Touareg rebels with his own hand-picked militia of fellow Arab fighters.  Then there was Mohammed Ould Aiwanatt, an immensely rich Arab trader and trafficker from the Tilemsi region north of Gao, whose fingers were stuck in all manner of merchandise, both sweet and sour.  And last, but not least, there was Baba Ould Cheikh, mayor of the tiny but criminally significant village of Tarkint, north of Bourem.

All these men had their legitimate trades, but a desert potentate cannot operate on a measly government salary or a polite business in kosher goods alone. You’ve got to cross a line or two if you want to be a big shot Saharan player. All four harvested rich pickings in an ever hardening sequence of contraband goods. Their role as government and Gaddafi-backed hostage-negotiators offered a number of synergies with their other activities, including influence, protection for smuggling rackets, fame, kudos and a handsome cut of the ransom pie.

Certain Touareg officials and traders also benefited from AQIM’s presence in northern Mali, even though negotiators like Ibrahim Mohammed Ag Assalegh deny ever receiving a penny for their services. Iyad Ag Ghali, the ultimate Touareg ‘fixer’ and hostage-negotiator has hardly said a word to the media, either national or international, since he swapped rebellion for God in the mid 1990s. But it seems unlikely that men of his ilk would get involved in such a strenuous, draining and time-consuming endeavour as negotiating the release of western hostages without receiving a cut of the millions of euros paid by some western governments in return for the freedom of their subjects. Most Malian Touareg leaders were genuine in their frequently-voiced fear that the presence of AQIM in northern Mali was likely to damage the reputation of their people and lead to a disastrous confusion of Touareg nationalism and Islamist terrorism in the minds of international governments, the media and the public at large. On the other hand, they also held the view that hostage-negotiation was a job that deserved a handsome pay-out. If western governments were going to pour these astronomical sums into the coffers of international terrorists, then why shouldn’t they be recompensed for their honest humanitarian efforts. Furthermore, lower down the food chain, Touaregs, whether petty criminals or ordinary young men out of luck and out of hope, also provided services to AQIM as drivers, guides, cooks, suppliers of fuel, food and other essentials, informants and even, ultimately, ‘procurers’, who job it was to actually kidnap the hapless victims and hand them over to men like Abou Zeid or Mokhtar Belmokhtar for a fee.
But the northern Malian Arabs were closer to AQIM than the Touareg, ethnically, linguistically, ideologically and commercially. They were plugged into networks of kith and kin that extended from Gao to Timbuktu up to Taodenni and deep in Mauritania and Algeria. The one-eyed AQIM emir Mokhtar Belmokhtar was married to an Arab woman from Timbuktu. He was part of a family there, and families in the southern Sahara can be like quasi-political organisations, with far-reaching roots and branches stretching from the Atlantic ocean to the shores of Libya.

Austria dispatched a four man team to Bamako to coordinate efforts to free the hostages, headed by the sharp-suited stripey-shirted diplomat Anton Prohaska. They refused to negotiate directly with Al Qaida, outwardly at least, but instead tried to persuade other ‘friendly’ Muslim nations to put pressure on the Al Qaida leadership. Their dealings with Malian bureaucracy were frustrating, especially when it came the head of the Malian secret services Col. Mamy Coulibaly, whom one of the Austrian team described as “long on promises but short on information.”  Prohaska did the rounds of the foreign embassies, frequently dropping into the US Embassy for a chat and some advice. Another Austrian team that was sent to Algiers also made little progress. One of them described the Algerians as “extremely tough and security minded.”  There was also a confusing side-track opened by the arrival of a two-man team from the private security firm Blackwater, already notorious for its work for the US government during its occupation of Iraq. The duo booked into one of Bamako swishest hotels and tendered their services to the Malian government and the Austrian, proclaiming their expertise in hostage negotiating and promising to liberate Ebner and Kloiber in return for a handsome cut of the ransom of course.  They weren’t successful.

The negotiations dragged and so did the months. Wolfgang Ebner’s son Bernhard pleaded with the terrorists to show clemency, and eventually came to Mali himself to try and help free his father, without success.  The phone lines between Vienna and Bamako vibrated with high-level but ineffectual diplomacy.  Prohaska was well into his eighth month in the Malian capital, and began telling all and sundry that his useful time there was coming to an end.  Ebner tried to escape from the AQIM camp in northern Mali, but managed to walk a mere 25 miles before he was picked up by a trucker who returned him to the camp. In the end, Ebner and Kloiber were released on October 31st 2008, nine months and nine days after they were kidnapped.  Did they survive thanks to nomadic pressure, or to the fact that they converted to Islam whilst in captivity, through spiritual conviction or dire expediency it’s hard to tell, or to the Berabiche negotiators and their Libyan slush fund?  No, probably none of the above. The real reason was a 2 million euro ransom that was brought to Bamako aboard a special Austrian government airplane by Ursula Plassnik, the Austrian minister of foreign affairs, on board a special flight.  2 million euros in a country where a teacher earns barely 70 euros a month.  It was about the same as paying 200 million euros to a criminal gang in Europe.  That kind of money buys you a lot of weapons, and brand new cars.  And influence.  No wonder Al Qaida’s appetite for ransoms only grew keener.

 Andy Morgan.   (c) 2013, all rights reserved.
An extract from my forthcoming book on Tinariwen and the story of the Sahara desert since independence.

The post GUNS, CIGARETTES AND SALAFI DREAMS – The roots of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Touareg artisan in Assaghan Association workshops, Tamanrasset. (c) Andy Morgan

This is an extract from a pamphlet / article / short book (fate will delete as applicable) that I’m writing about the Touareg blacksmith or artisan. It’s a complex subject and I’m approaching in my usual journalistic and non-academic way. This is bound to ruffle some scholarly feathers…an enjoyable sport in itself. I’m writing this piece for my wife Kate, who runs Saharan Arts, a company that imports Touareg jewellery and sells it on the internet or at UK Festivals like WOMAD and Latitude. Anybody who wants to know more, or buy a lovely present, please visit www.saharanarts.com.  Enjoy…)

In the old days, the Touareg artisan blacksmith (enad sing., inedan pl.) lived towards the bottom of the social heap.  His status wasn’t quite as lowly as that of the slaves (iklan) or even freed slaves (iderfan).   But there’s no doubt that he was subservient to the warrior nobility (imajeren), the tribute paying vassals (imrhad) and the marabouts and judges (ineslemen).   There’s an old Mauritanian proverb which says that the artisan must always be tah-ktab or tah-erkab, either under the power of the ‘book’, in other words, the holy man and his Qur’an, or under the ‘shield’, in other words, the noble warrior.  Nevertheless, like most social relationships in this ancient feudal world, the artisan was tied to his superiors and inferiors by bonds of reciprocity that made each class indispensible to the survival of the whole.  It was a supple system of give and take that gave society its unity, its strength and sinew.

The artisan made almost everything that was necessary for daily life and survival in the desert; tents, bags, saddles, swords, pottery, padlocks, keys, shields, lances, beds, musical instruments and, of course, jewellery.   But his usefulness extended beyond that of a craftsman, a maker of objects.   In fact, if you list every role ever attributed to the artisan class, you end up with an extraordinary array of trades and skills; jeweller, saddle-maker, leather-worker, carpenter, sword-maker, cobbler, potter, bead-maker, tanner, mat maker, teacher, historian, musician, nuptial negotiator or matchmaker, wedding organiser, midwife, messenger, diplomat, adviser, general repairman, knife-sharpener, circumciser, cattle-brander, hairdresser, surgeon, dentist, doctor, vet, apothecary…even magician!

Of course, no single artisan ever performed all these roles.   To begin with, some of them were reserved for female artisans or tinedan, notably tent making, leatherworking and bead making.    And there was also a hierarchy of activity within the artisan class itself.   Jewellers were considered to be the masters, below them came the potters, then the woodworkers and so on.   But it was not uncommon for a master jeweller to also be called on to fix a broken sword or saddle, pull a tooth, circumcise a young boy, take part in the negotiation of a wedding between the offspring of two noble families, or play music and recite epic poetry at some grand feast or event.

The most important characteristic of the artisans is that they belong to a hereditary ‘closed’ caste.  You are born an artisan, you cannot become one.  Your career choices are limited, albeit within the extraordinarily wide range of traditional artisan activity.  Boys usually start their apprenticeship at around the age of seven, working the bellows while their fathers, uncles and elder brothers melt down and fashion the medial, tidying up around the workshop, making tea.  After a few years the apprentice might be allowed to finish off a cross or a bangle, or make a very simple ring or earring.   Gradually, after about fifteen years gradually ascending the hierarchy of skills he becomes a master artisan.

The artisans even had their own special language called Ténet.   Nicolaisen concludes that Ténet is an invented language, like cockney rhyming-slang or Parisian verlan (backslang), which gave the artisans the means to communicate secretly in the presence of non-artisans, thus increasing their chances of boosting business and surviving.   Most of the time the artisans spoke Tamashek, even when amongst their own family.  Ténet seems to have been only an supplementary form of linguistic ‘armour’.   Strangely, Gabus makes no mention of Ténet at all, stating merely that the artisans generally spoke too much, with lax manners of speech and a smaller vocabulary than the nobles.

In traditional society there were both nomadic and sedentary artisans.   The nomadic artisan would live in the camp of a noble, vassal or marabout, travelling with them from pasture to pasture which his own family.   They would make a huge number of goods and provide other services to their lord in return for protection, food, millet, milk, sugar, tea and clothing.  He would also work for inhabitants of other camps in the vicinity, always in exchange for food and goods rather than money.  His collection of tools was perforce small and easily portable from place to place.   Gabus lists the usual barter price for different jewels, according to an artisan from the Hoggar region of southern Algeria:

A tchérot amulet pendant = 1 young camel

Two rings = one kid goat

A small padlock = one goat

A large padlock = two goats

A dagine style bracelet = two goats

A veil weight / padlock key = one goat

It is said that the nomadic artisans were generally less skilled, and their work was more basic and primitive than that of their sedentary counterparts, who lived in houses in towns like Boutilimit, Oualata, Timbuktu, Agadez, In-Gall and Tahoua.  These Sahelian ‘ports’ were linked by trade routes to the sophisticated urban centres of North Africa, the Middle East and even Europe.   New ideas, complex skills, tools, metals and other raw materials travelled with the caravans into the deepest Sahara via these trade routes and enriched the repertoire of the sedentary artisans.  Out in the bush, the nomadic artisans lived a remoter and more isolated existence, and therefore found it harder to benefit from imported ways.

The origins and character of the artisan blacksmith.

The artisans themselves have their own set of poetic origin myths.   They claim that their tools, especially their hammer, tongs and anvil were handed down to them by Father Adam and the Prophet David or Sidna Daouda taught them the dark art of iron smelting, and other less problematic skills like stone-cutting, moulding and engraving.

Other non-artisan members of desert society recount less charitable legends about the origins of the Kel Inedan.   The great Jean Gabus was told the story that one day the Prophet Mohammed was bathing, and some children happened to see him.   One of them mocked the Prophet and that wayward youth was the ancestor of the artisans.   Another story he heard tells how the angel Gabriel asked Eve to show him her children so that they could be blessed.   Eve dutifully brought out all her offspring except one, whom she hid away from the angel’s beatific gaze.   That child was the ancestor of all artisans.   In Mauretania, Gabus was also informed that the artisans took lessons in magic from the Ehel Belhamar or ‘People of the Devil’ so that they could protect themselves from the evil influence of the metals with which they were obliged to work.

Academics have searched for metaphorical truth in these myths and legends and some have come to the conclusion that the figure of Saint David proves the theory that the artisans are descended from Jewish jewellers from the Souss and Drâa valleys in the southern Atlas mountains or the Touat and M’zab regions north of Tamanrasset, all of which did have sizeable Jewish populations in the middle ages.    It seems almost certain that some desert clans or tribes do have Jewish origins, notably the Kel Gress and the Daoussak (‘Sons of Issac’), and it must also be remembered that the whole of North Africa has ancient roots in Jewish culture, thanks to the Phoenicians and later cultures from the Levant who colonized most of the Mediterranean littoral before and during the days of the Roman empire.

Artisan at Assoc. Assaghan (c) Andy Morgan

However, the theory that all Touareg artisans are descended from Jews who came down from the north is tenuous.   What is most striking about many Inedan is their Negroid appearance, or rather, their completely distinct physiognomy, in which Negroid traces are often very clear.   A Touareg can identify an artisan merely from his facial features, even if he comes from a region thousands of miles away across the desert.   This has lead to speculation that the Inedan are descended from an ancient black race who lived in the desert before the Berber tribes of the north came south and who were subsequently subdued and forced to work for their new ‘whiter’ overlords.

At times the assertion that the craftsmen who make such beautiful and sophisticated jewellery could only be descended from Jews or maybe Arab jewellers who came to the desert from Cairo and Baghdad in the early middle ages, smacks of mild racism and a reprehensible disbelief that such artistry can have its roots in black Africa itself.   But if you consider the extremely sophisticated societies that existed in sub-Saharan West Africa, from the end of the Roman Empire right through to the 17^th century, such as the Ghana, Mali and Songhai Empires, all famously rich in gold, as well as the extraordinary bronzes that were produced over 900 years ago in the Yoruban city of Ifé, in modern day Benin, using precisely the same lost wax technique that the Touareg artisans employ to make their famous crosses, then it seems perfectly possible that the source of the artisan’s craft lies to the south, rather than to the north.

Helen Hagan champions yet another origin theory, which holds that the Inedan’s ancestors came from the Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia in the east, that they had a red ochreish skin colour and that they were conquered by the fairer-skinned imajeren.   It’s true that some Touareg bear a striking resemblance to native Americans, and that they are often referred to by their southern black neighbours as les peaux rouges, ‘the redskins’, but once again this theory is tenuous.

The fact is that all artisan origin theories are tenuous, and will probably remain so until same serious DNA ancestry-tracing work is done in the region.  Despite the ‘closed’ endogamous nature of the artisan clan, I prefer to believe that a variety of different racial and cultural traits are bundled together in the modern-day Inedan.   No doubt the skill and knowledge of Jewish jewellers from the Anti-Atlas and the Algerian plateaux did filter further south gradually over the centuries, no doubt grandees who travelled to the Sahara from Cairo, Jerusalem and Baghdad brought their own artisans with them, no doubt Berber craftsmen from the North travelled south in baggage trains of successive military conquerors, no doubt there were already considerable metal working skills amongst the black peoples of the Niger Rivers and since the Peulh or Fulani people who populate the whole of West Africa almost certainly came originally from what is now The Sudan and Ethiopia, there was probably a major influence from that region as well.   What we probably have in the Touareg artisan of today is a mongrel racial and cultural mixture that has been created over centuries of Saharan interchange or brassage, as the French say.

Some further clues about the origins of the Kel Inedan can be wrung from the attitudes of Touareg society towards the artisan caste.  Disdainful, mistrustful, fearful and mildly racist, these attitudes are a remarkable echo of baser cultural prejudices in our own society, especially towards Jews, Gypsies, immigrants and manual labourers.   The litany of derogation that appears in the academic studies makes for potent reading.   In the eyes of decent Touareg society, the artisans are crafty, mischievous, lazy, greedy, indiscreet, loose-tongued, ill mannered, badly dressed, duplicitous, untrustworthy, stupid, in league with evil spirits and tangled up with dark magic.

I remember chatting with some Touareg friends about a common acquaintance of ours who had apparently embezzled a small sum of money.   “What do you expect,” one of my friends said without the slightest shadow of shame or embarrassment.  “He’s a fourgeron (a blacksmith)!”  The man whose reputation was thus being sullied came from the artisan caste, but wasn’t in fact involved in any of the traditional artisan activities.   He was a driver, car-mechanic and odd-jobber.   My friend flung this mild insult his way with no malice or rancour, and the artisan was back amongst us laughing and joking that very same evening.   A subtext of the insult was that our artisan friend just couldn’t help who he was!   It’s just the way he was born, and there was nothing that anyone, least of all the artisans themselves, could do about it.  But it didn’t mean that the artisan was to be ostracized or rejected in any way.

Kel Inedan - the masters of fire. (c) Andy Morgan.

The episode illustrates a very strange symbiotic relationship between the artisans and other Touareg.  The majority image of the artisan mixes disdain, mistrust, fear with a kind of respect and dependency.   If the artisan is descended from a conquered clan of aboriginal inhabitants who lived in the Sahara before the arrival of the Berber tribes from the north, then the disdain that Touareg society feels towards him is perhaps an echo of the original hauteur that the victor felt toward the vanquished.   Perhaps their mistrust can be attributed to that universal contempt which dominant social groups feel towards subservient ones, especially if they are racially different and ‘closed’.   Maybe this antipathy is also attributable to the natural arrogance of the warrior nobility towards those who depend on their manual labour for their livelihood.   And perhaps the fear comes from a superstitious wonder at the ‘magic’ of metalworking, the fiery transformation of base raw materials that were once locked up inside soil and rocks into wondrous jewels, swords and other objects, using processes that are deeply entwined with very ancient, possibly animist, religious beliefs.  One can almost picture the Berber lord shuddering, proud in his racial, cultural and religious superiority, as he looked down on the black animist metal-worker coaxing some wondrous object out of the primordial fire using mysterious and opaque gris-gris and evoking the names ancient and unknowable spirits.   After all, this terror of those who work with fire, who mould and sublimate nature itself, is common amongst many early or pre-industrial societies.

But it’s the respect and licence given to the artisan, which makes their relationship with the rest of Touareg society so strange, even unique.   Gabus recounts how artisans sometimes became the trusted friends and advisors of clan chiefs or other noble persons, and how they were often asked to go on delicate diplomatic missions, or to negotiate the bride price and dowry for an important wedding.   Like the court-jesters of medieval Europe, the artisan was given much freer licence to express his own opinions in the presence of the rich and powerful than other members of society.

Paradoxically, the artisans were also deemed to be wise and knowledgeable, especially when it came to tribal and clan history or the useful properties of the natural world.   They were respected for their extraordinary ability to produce all the good necessary for life in the desert, and their wide range of their skills and know-how.  They were often prized for their loyalty and friendship.   The very fact that they were not of a noble caste, and were therefore excluded from the politics and power-struggles of tribes and clans probably made their friendship less ‘dangerous’ and more secure than that of other clan members.

Like their counterparts south of the Niger, the griots of Manding, Songhai and Bamana society, the artisans were the repositories of society’s oral history and were excellent musicians.   Nicolaisen tells how many noble Touareg despised and shunned Inedan for much of the time, except at weddings, feasts and ceremonies when the artisans were called on to sing and recite poetry and thereby oil the social machinery.   Furthermore it was considered bad form to loose one’s temper with an artisan or his provocative words and extremely dishonourable to hit or wound one.   In some ways, the artisan’s freedom to speak his mind was useful in as much as it could deflate potential conflict, thereby maintaining harmony and strengthening the equilibrium of the clan.  And this free speech was more often that not softened and nuanced by a high degree of humour and hilarity.   The comic genius of the Touareg is something that is very often ignored or overlooked by outsiders who fail to see beyond their characteristic haughtiness and reserve.

Gabus also claims that the artisans themselves were fully aware of and accepting of their own unique place in society.  “An artisan who never asks for what he wants, or tries to get it, is worthless,” Gabus was told by an artisan.   In other words, it was all about give and take.   The artisan played a game of survival with his Touareg neighbours, providing them with their necessities, but remaining apart on an equal-but-different footing, accepting taunts and jibes in return for custom and grudging respect, earning the most he could for himself and his family with his keen sense of opportunity, his acute bargaining skills and his nose for a good deal.

Jewellery and the Artisan in the modern age

However timeless, anchored and ancient Touareg society might seem to the visitor who leaves the bustling frenzy of a European city and arrives in the apparently infinite calm of the Saharan bush, it is hard to overestimate the radical and painful changes that have gripped the desert in the last century.  And these changes have also fundamentally affected the role and business of the artisan.

When Jean Gabus was carrying out his research in the 1940s and 1950s, he observed this changing world at first hand.  The artisans were relying more and more on cash transactions and less and less on the old bartering system.   In certain ways, cash freed the artisan, making him less indentured to his overlord and master higher up the Touareg hierarchy.  The old tribal and clan chiefs, along with their noble retinues, were loosing influence year by year, thanks to the French ban on traditional raiding and the careful colonial management of inter-tribal conflicts.  The French more or less ruled the desert through acquiescent Touareg chiefs, but this policy also weakened their reputation, at times making them appear little more than puppets and collaborators of the colonial power.   The decrease in traditional inter-tribal warfare meant less demand for the once indispensible swords, daggers and lances, and the decreasing power of the nobility meant that the artisan was able to look further afield for his living.

Another new and strange activity was selling to foreigners and tourists, who were less conversant with the price of goods in the desert and therefore often happy to pay more for jewels and other mementoes than local people.  Furthermore tourists have tastes that aren’t necessarily shared by locals, and this had already begun to skew the production choices which the artisans made.   The raw materials also began to change.   Purer silver became more easily available, as did better tools, procured via mail-order catalogues from France.

Local tastes and customs were also changing.   The wearing of jewellery had always been relatively regulated in traditional society.   What you wore depended on your sex, your marital status and your position in society.   A young girl would receive a small ‘ear-drop’ earring at the shortly after birth.   As she reached puberty she would be allowed tesabit bangles and ankelets, as well as all manner of beaded jewellery.   When she started courting she would don a chatchat or celebra necklace, both of which were associated with young love and flirtation.   A khomeissa pendant was more appropriate for a married woman, because of its associations with fertility and protection.   The large triangular teraout pendants were often part of the bride price for a wedding, thereafter forming the centrepiece of a jewellery collection.   ‘Lower’ caste women were wore relatively modest jewellery that was in no danger of upstaging that of their ‘superior’ caste peers.

Men were expected to wear jewellery in a sober and dignified fashion, especially if they were nobles.  A silver, or silver and brass tchérot pendant around the neck and a few others adorning their tagelmoust or turban in addition or a tanfouk ring, with its red carnelian or agate stone which was deemed to help heal wounds and coagulate the blood, were the limits of ‘decent’ adornment.  A boy would receive both his tagelmoust and his tchérot when entering puberty.   They were the armoury of his manhood, and were solemnly passed down to him by his father or guardian.   Qur’anic verses and other protective writings were also kept in leather pouches that hung around the necks of both men and women.

Furthermore, silver, or at worse silver and bronze, were the only acceptable metals in traditional jewellery making.   Gold was proscribed by the Qur’an, especially as an adornment for men, and feared for its malicious properties.   Iron was also believed to be imbued with dark and malevolent forces.   Silver was pure, clean, holy, luminous and warm, like the heart of a true believer.

The Touareg have the same word for both silver and money: azrouf.    In the pre-cash society that existed in the desert before independence, jewellery WAS money, and vice versa.   Women literally wore their wealth, in the form of pendants, earrings, bracelets, earrings, rings, anklets and head adornments.   Rings and crosses were sometimes just strung along a piece of leather and worn as a necklace.   When it came to paying for something, one of these items could just be detached from the rest and handed over.

To a certain extent, jewellery still serves a variety of interlinked purposes; status symbol, public display of wealth, means of exchange, protection against evil spirits and mishaps, beauty enhancement and token of flirtation.   But cash has taken the place of bartering except in the remotest parts of the desert.   Moreover, along with many erstwhile nomads, most artisans have now relocated to towns and cities, often grouping together to form associations or trading cooperatives, which allow them to deal with modern bureaucracy, regulation and taxes.

The artisan’s clientele has also changed considerably.   Mohammed from the Association Assaghan in Tamanrasset told me that 60% of his sales are now to tourists and visitors, and 40% to locals.   As in days of old, the locals order their jewels, rather than buy from existing stock.  They will go and see the artisan and discuss the exact specifications, size and materials of the piece they want to buy, pay a portion of the price up front and then the balance on delivery.    The artisan must make sure that the quality of the work is of an acceptable standard, otherwise his client will refuse to pay the balance and demand his deposit back.  Sometimes clients come in with existing jewels and ask the artisan to melt down the silver and refashion it into an entirely new piece.

The most cataclysmic upheavals in desert life took place in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, due to the terrible droughts that afflicted the entire southern Sahara in 1971 – 1974 and 1984 – 1985.  The transformation of traditional society which had begun with the arrival of the French was accelerated a hundred-fold, as the animal herds died and pastoral nomadism became almost impossible.  Many Touareg men and their families left the region of their birth, to begin new lives, with different allegiances and imperatives in other parts of the desert.  It’s impossible to say how many jewels and heirlooms were sold during these dark and desperate days to pay for food or transport to a refugee camp or a different country.   Gabus compares these old jewels to the piles of shoes, glasses or wristwatches in the photos taken in concentration camps during the Holocaust in Europe.

The wealthier Touareg who were able to seek refuge in the cities of North Africa, Nigeria and even the Middle East, returned with mutated values.  Gold, which is more favoured in the Arab world than it is in traditional Berber societies, became more fashionable and desirable.   Women, who had traditionally worn a sober mixture of dark blue and white robes, or shiny luxurious indigo on special occasions, adopted the multi-coloured fashions of Mauretania, Algeria, Libya or Burkina Faso, where many Touareg families took refuge during the worst parts of the famine.   The old restrictions on the appropriate wearing of jewellery according to age and status began to fade and disappear.

It must be said that the artisans reacted to these changes with considerable ingenuity, resourcefulness, self-reliance and a fatalism that Europeans find hard to understand, but which is necessary psychological armour in times of hardship.   God willed it all, and there was nothing more to be said.    In the absence of the old symbiosis with his noble lord, and his exclusive mandate to manufacture all the objects necessary for desert existence, the artisan was faced between the stark choice of adapting to the new realities, or disappearing.

From the 1950s onwards boutiques began to appear in Tamanrasset, Agadez, Timbuktu and further afield, catering for the tourist trade and offering a wide range of jewellery, leatherwork, swords, saddles, padlocks, souvenirs and knickknacks.   Today, almost any desert city or town of 5,000 inhabitants or more has its artisans’ association, usually with a purpose built premises in the centre of town with a showroom and a salesman or two conversant in English, French and German, at the very least.

Since the late 1970s the market for Touareg jewellery and crafts has become global.  Many artisans’ associations will elect a trusted person to become an international representative and send him to Europe or North America with several suitcases laden down with stock for international retail clients.  These same reps will attend international tourism and crafts fairs and exhibit their wares at museums and festivals.   The number of shops and websites the world over offering Touareg jewellery has grown exponentially in the last two decades.

Thomas Seligman has written a detailed account of how the revered French fashion house Hermès commissioned Touareg artisans to make a range of silver clasps, buckles and other objects, as well as using Touareg motifs and designs across all manner of expensive fashion goods in the early 1990s.  With the help of an intermediary facilitator and fixer called Jean Yves Brizot, Hermès even set up and funded an entire workshop of artisans in Agadez, which employed over thirty craftsmen for a number of years.   Touareg jewellery, crafts and clothing have also been used by fashion designers such Jean-Paul Gautier, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent for high-end photo shoots and as the inspiration for new ranges and models.   Touareg chic is a good option for those western fashionistas who desire to ‘go ethnic’ and yet remain sober, minimal and elegant.

How easy and yet somehow futile it is to mourn the gradual loss of paradise.   It’s a pastime that not only preoccupies the minds of westerners who come to the desert in search of some kind of pre-industrial ideal of human nobility but also, in an admittedly different way, the minds of the Touareg themselves, especially those over the age of 50.   I have always been struck by the potency of nostalgia for the past in Touareg society.   It’s as if the process of assimilation into the modern world has occurred so suddenly, so brutally and in such an unwarranted way that many older Touareg just can’t cope with it, and prefer to dream of bygone days when there was more water, more respect, more peace and more freedom.   Things today are just kerzat kerzat, a comical piece of Tamashek slang meaning ‘shoddy’, ‘cheap’ and ‘worthless’.

The artisans, however, cannot afford to indulge regrets, even though they might still lurk deep inside.  They know that survival is a matter of looking ahead, not backwards, of using cunning and instinct to find customers and make the goods that those customers want to buy, whether they’re desert dwellers or tourists browsing idly at shops or stalls in Mopti, Tamanrasset, Tangiers, Barcelona, Brussels, Paris, San Francisco or on the world wide web.  An acute and unsentimental instinct for survival whatever context God provides has been hardwired into their mental circuitry

And it could be argued that this survival instinct has served Touareg culture better than many Touareg themselves realise.   For it is in part thanks to the artisans that the skill, range and depth of Touareg crafts survive and even thrive when the social context that first gave birth to it has long been consigned to history.   The ingenuity and resourcefulness of the artisans, their ability to travel and assume the role of desert ambassadors in far-flung parts of the world, their talent for dealing with strangers, their openness and autonomy have preserved the essence of the Touareg cultural identity, keeping it alive, vital, breathing and even growing.   The Touareg owe their artisans a great deal.

Gabus expresses the misunderstandings and tensions of modernity very well, and remember, he was writing about the desert of the 1950s!:

“Preservation at all costs of the traditional heritage by means of a kind of isolation, of egotistical protectionism, false romanticism and backwards thinking bears no relation either to the desires, nor to the reality of the people themselves (the artisans).   These people, like everyone else all over the world, dream of something other, want to earn money, live better and be in harmony with the times.”

Andy Morgan, (c) 2010

The post KEL INEDAN – The Touareg blacksmiths appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

“Silence is death and yet if you speak you die.  If you keep quiet you die.  So then speak and die.” Tahar Djaout

“I want to speak and I don’t want to die” Matoub Lounès

A grave between an olive and a cherry tree

Death finally caught up with him on the lonely bend of a mountain road.   The bullet-strafed car was still smoking and the pools of blood on the asphalt were still warm when the news broke.   Telephones lines crackled and the Internet came alive.   “They’ve killed him.”   “He was with his wife and two sisters in law.”  “They were hit too.”   “It happened just after 1pm.”   “On the Tizi Ouzou road.”  “It was a false road block.”   “It was an ambush.”  “It was the GIA.”  “It was Chenoui’s men.”   “It was the government.”   “He’s dead.”  “He’s gone.”  “Matoub has gone.”  Some even whispered, “It had to happen.”

Within hours angry mourners in their thousands had gathered around the Mohammed Nedir hospital in Tizi Ouzou, where Matoub Lounès’ bloodied remains were taken after the attack.   Their shouts boomed like mixed-shot salvos of anger, desperation and grief. “Government…Assassin!”   “Zéroual…Assassin!”   “Islamists…Assassins!”   “The generals…Assassins!”   Over the next few days youths took to the streets of Tizi Ouzou, Akbou, Sidi Aïch, Bejaia, Aïn el Hammam and Tizi Guénif and unleashed their rage on government buildings, party offices, banks and shops.   The police and security forces retaliated nervously with water cannons, tear gas and bullets.   Three protestors were killed.   The Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia appealed feebly for calm.    Kabylia was burning.

In Paris, thousands gathered in Place de La République, in front of an immense black and white portrait of Matoub.  Actors, politicians, community leaders, writers and musicians took to the stage to say a few words or sing a song.  The great Berber singer Idir denounced the new Arabisation law which was due to be passed on July 5^th making Arabic the compulsory language of almost every official or semi-official transaction in Algeria.  The crowd stood smouldering under the fluttering yellow, blue and green flags of Kabylia, arms raised to the skies, chanting his songs.  “Matoub was the Bard of Kabylia.  They wanted to shut him up so they killed him,” said one mourner.   “He sang for freedom, our freedom, Berber freedom,” said another.  “He was our Che Guevara,” said a third.

The Berber Cultural Movement (MCB) called for a general strike and the response was overwhelming.  Tizi Ouzou, the capital of Kabylia, was enveloped in a sepulchral silence on Sunday 28^th June 1998, three days after Matoub’s murder.  Boarded up shops and businesses looked like mausoleums lining the paths of a huge cemetery.   Many of the city’s inhabitants had left before dawn and made their way up the mountain to Taourirt Moussa, the village where Matoub was born.   They stuffed themselves in cars or braved the 25km on foot.  The roads were hopelessly jammed.   This, for once, was a real roadblock.   In every hollow, on every ridge, down every street or path and on every rooftop around the Matoub villa, as far as the eye could see, a sea of mourners stood simmering under a hot and ripening sun.  The presence of women, dressed defiantly in their colourful traditional dress or western threads, all of them unveiled, surprised many.   Traditionally, funerals in Algeria are all-male affairs.

The heat was intense, the atmosphere even more so, and many fainted.  Militants from the various Berber political groups and local village defence associations policed the gathering. Their work was light because no one was in the mood for trouble making.  Placards bearing Matoub’s intense and troubled features were held aloft.   Banners broke the silence and the sobs.  “Remember and Revenge!”   “No Peace Without Tamazight”   “Arabo-Islamism, the shortest way to HELL.”   Eventually Matoub’s body was brought out, wrapped only in an Algerian flag, and laid tenderly in a grave just in front of his family home, between an olive and a cherry tree, facing the majestic Djurdjura Mountains which he had loved with such a passion.  His mother Aldjia fired two shots in the air and his sister Malika made a short speech which ended, “The face of Lounès will be missed but his songs will dwell forever in our hearts.  Today is a day of great joy.  We are celebrating the birth of Matoub Lounès.”


*      *      *      *

One God?  One Nation?  One People?

Like a young adult who has just broken free from parental chains, any newborn nation state must grapple with the fundamental questions “Who am I?  What is my identity?”  Sometimes the answer comes easily.  Countries whose territory is already blessed with linguistic and cultural coherence have little trouble establishing a national identity.  But for many of the huge amorphous nations of Africa, which were often carelessly cobbled together from a chaotic patchwork of tribes and ethnicities by civil servants in the oak-panelled ministries of Paris or London, the question of identity has always posed huge problems.   In the end one political group, tribe or clan usually imposes its rule, its ideology and often its culture on the rest of the country, by force if necessary.  Proud, defiant but still politically immature, the new leaders of these fledgling states find they cannot entertain progressive notions of federalism and live-and-let-live cohabitation for fear that the weak mortar that binds their nation together will just crumble into dust and anarchy.  The grail of national unity becomes an end that justifies the most violent and oppressive means.

Algeria’s birth pains were brutal and severe.  The war of independence that ended in 1962 was one of extreme hatred and extreme violence.  It combined a Gestapo-like approach to civilian control – many former resistance fighters turned French army officers were all too familiar with the Gestapo’s methods – with the kind of all-terrain guerrilla shock tactics that would later find favour with the Viet Cong, the Mau Mau, and many other popular people’s armies.   The French used napalm, torture, mass civilian executions, and a scorched earth strategy, anything to defeat their invisible opponents.  The rebel mujaheddin answered in kind.  Europeans killed Muslims.   Muslims killed Europeans.   Muslims killed Muslims and eventually Europeans killed Europeans.  The scars went very deep.   It all ended with the birth of an independent Algeria and one of the greatest mass exoduses of the 20^th century.   Over one million people of European descent left the country in the few months before independence; businessmen, doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers and civil servants, taking with them the very foundations of a functioning civil society.   The country’s new leaders were left with hopes and ideas but few of the skills necessary to turn them into reality.

As long as the war was taking its murderous course, the rebel nationalist movement managed to maintain at least an outward appearance of unity.   But beneath this veneer there were deep divisions which began to surface even before the ink was dry on the Evian Accords of March 1962 which guaranteed Algeria her independence.   Various factions had very different answers to that “Who are we?” question.   The émigré revolutionary council lead by Ahmed Ben Bella, who eventually managed to seize power and become Algeria’s first effective head of state, were inspired by three overarching ideologies.   The first was command and control socialism, Soviet style.   The army and the state had a duty to commandeer the economic, social and natural resources of the country and manage them for the good of the country.  The second was more a reaction than an ideology.  Algeria would slowly and surely purge French civilisation, the French language and French cultural values from society.  In time, Arabic would take over as the language of education, the judiciary, science, technology, culture and commerce.  French notions of égalité, fraternité and liberté would be strictly controlled and curtailed.  Muslim Algerian intellectuals and thinkers, who had all hitherto used the French language as their vehicle of expression, would now have to think, dream and cry in Arabic.

The third ideology was Arab nationalism.   Ben Bella and his crew had delved deep into the same well of political inspiration as Nasser in Egypt, Assad in Syria or the Ba’athists in Iraq.  They all believed that if a nation state in North Africa or the Middle East was to stand proud, defiant and spiritually self-sufficient in a post colonial world, then it must draw on the glorious history and culture of Arabic civilisation, the unifying power of classical Middle Eastern Arabic and the bedrock of Islam in order to succeed.   ‘Petty’ regional and ethnic differences must be buried or obliterated.   Unity was paramount.

These ideologies only began to make a small difference to daily life in Algeria during the short reign of Ben Bella, who was ousted in a military coup by his nemesis and erstwhile comrade Colonel Houari Boumedienne in 1965.   Boumedienne was an Arabic Literature teacher turned steely military leader and staunch command and control socialist.  He was also a die hard Arab Nationalist and it during his reign that the process of Arabicising and nationalising the country really gained momentum.   Apart from his agrarian and industrial revolutions he also instigated a cultural revolution with the aim of ‘decolonising the mind’.   He knew that Algerian society was fundamentally fractious and partisan with a historic tendency to splinter and implode.  Only the discipline of the great revolutionary army and unifying forces of Islam, state socialism and the Arabic language could hold the nation together.  His programme of Arabicising all walks of Algerian life was continued after his death in 1978 by the new president Chadli Bendjedid and into the 1990s by Presidents Lamine Zéroual and even the present incumbent Adelaziz Bouteflika.   All these men were loosely affiliated to the nationalist clan who took power in 1962.  Their ideas have softened and shifted over the decades but many of their core beliefs about identity have remained unchanged.

There was, however, a very different answer to the question “Who are we?”  The problem with this pan-Arabic, nationalist, ‘Ba’athist’ inspired vision of Algeria was that at least 25% of the country didn’t even speak Arabic at all.   They spoke Berber.  Instead of looking to the Middle East for an answer to the country’s identity, these Berbers looked to their own past.   They saw that their ancestors, the original inhabitants of North Africa, had a heroic tradition of defying the might of successive invaders – Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, Spaniards, Turks and French – even though they never prevailed long enough to establish their own Berber nation.   They revered their own heroes like Jugurtha, Massinissa, Kahena and Koceila and took an intense pride in the riches of their own poetic and musical traditions.   Their vision of Algeria was that of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Mediterranean country, which possessed more affinity with neighbours like Spain, Greece, or Yugoslavia than far-flung Middle Eastern nations like Egypt, Syria or Iraq.   They recognised the fact that the Algerian territory had long been home to a highly nuanced patchwork of different cultures – Berber, Arab, Spanish, Turkish, Jewish and French – and that the local Arabic dialect reflected this mongrel past.   This was something to be cherished and preserved, not brutally eradicated by the artificial imposition of the classical Arabic of the Koran, a language that hardly any Algerian speaks in daily discourse to this day.   Their proposed solution was to establish Algerian Arabic, Berber and even French as the three official languages of the nation, and to let each be used according to habit, convenience or necessity.

There are Berber communities with different social and cultural characteristics dotted all over Algeria, and North Africa as a whole, but the largest and most significant are the Kabyles who inhabit a mountainous region of unparalleled beauty called Kabylia which is situated south east of the capital Algiers.   Dour, rugged, tough, free, ungovernable, honour-obsessed, dignified, home-sick, democratic, music loving, these are some of the characteristics, some would say clichés, perennially associated with the Kabyle.   For a long time their idyllic country has been neither large nor fertile enough to support all its sons, and emigration is hard-wired into the Kabyle experience.   The first Algerian Muslims to emigrate to France at the beginning of the 20^th century were Kabyles and they became the largest North African immigrant group in France before the 1960s.   Consequently it was the Kabyles who adapted quickest to the French language, to French ideas of egalitarianism, socialism, democracy and nationhood.   The first recognisable Algerian nationalist movement, the Étoile Nord-Africaine founded by Messali el Hadj in the 1920s, comprised mostly men of Kabyle origin.  The movement went through several tortuous mutations to emerge eventually as the Front de Liberation National or FLN in the 1950s.  Kabyles played pivotal roles in this evolutionary process.  They fought hard in the war of independence.  Kabylia itself with its remote valleys, ravines and mountaintops is classic guerrilla country and as such it suffered some of the worst brutalities of the conflict.   A body with its throat slit is said to be wearing a ‘Kabyle smile’ to this day.

Nevertheless it soon became apparent that many Kabyles in the nationalist movement had fundamental disagreements with their Arabic co-revolutionaries.  They were not prepared to see their Berber identity and their own dialect of the Berber language, known as Tamazight, disappear under the authoritarian umbrella of an Arabic socialist über-state.  They also had very different ideas about democracy and the future shape of Algeria’s government.   The traditional system of Kabyle village and clan politics, with its djemaat or village councils and aarouch or tribal councils, instilled a raw but visceral feeling for democracy and the values of community involvement and egalitarianism in many Kabyles.   This went against the grain of the authoritarian, centralised and top-down ethos of Arab nationalism.   Many Kabyles also recognised the importance of Islam but they preferred to let faith be a personal matter, between the individual and God, rather than something decreed and formulated by the state.   They increasingly feared that state-sanctioned Islam and an insistence on Arabic, the language of the Koran, as the only vehicle for education, would roll out a red carpet for extreme political Muslim fundamentalism, which was already making its presence felt in Egypt, the Middle East and Algeria by the 1960s.   The fundamentalist Muslim ulema or ‘scholars’, a revolutionary movement founded by Sheikh Abdelhamid Ben Badis in the 1920s, had already denounced Kabyle and Berber aspirations as “a reactionary doctrine born of imperialism.”   All in all, the answer of many Kabyles and, it has to be said, a fair number of other non-Berber Algerians to the question “Who are we?” could not have been more divergent to that supplied either by Ben Bella and his allies, or the fundamentalist Islamic revolutionaries for whom an Islamic state was the be all and end all.

Almost as soon as the independent flag of Algeria was fluttering freely over the skies of Algiers, the Kabyles were on the move.   There was a gradual purge of dissident Kabyle elements in the nationalist movement already underway by 1962 but a year later a senior Kabyle revolutionary called Hocine Aït Ahmed formed the Front des Forces Socialistes (FFS), as a vehicle to promote social democratic ideas and the rights of Berber minorities.   A full-scale revolt flared up in Kabylia against Ben Bella’s government, with skirmishes and reprisals as bloody and brutal as anything that had been seen during the war of independence.   Eventually Aït Ahmed was captured, sentenced to death, reprieved and exiled.   With his departure the entire Berber movement in Algeria collapsed or went underground.   The emphasis of the struggle moved to France where gradually throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Berber cultural awareness grew like a storm cloud in the ex-pat Algerian community.  Thanks to the activities of numerous Berber cultural groups, notably the Mouvement Culturel Berbère (MCB), the language, history, literature and music of the Berbers started to become a major force in the Diaspora.

What’s striking about this struggle is its essentially cultural nature.  Most Berbers aren’t fighting for autonomy or an outright Berber Algeria.  Nor is their struggle predominantly about trade union rights, women’s rights, cheap food, better schools and hospitals and an end to corruption although, like most other Algerians, they long for these things too.  Their overriding cause is simple; first and foremost the recognition of Tamazight as an official national language, suitable for use in schools, commerce and government business.  And secondly, a general acceptance that Algeria should be governed along secular, egalitarian, multi-cultural and democratic lines.   That in a nutshell is the Berber struggle.


* * * *

Childhood and strange fruit

Musing on his early childhood in the pages of his autobiography ‘Rebelle’ (Éditions Stock, 1995), Matoub Lounès wrote, “I was turbulent, I still am.  I’ll be a rebel for the rest of my life.”   In many ways his beginnings were that of the Kabyle Everyman.   He was born in 1956, in the middle of a bitingly cold Kabyle winter, in Taourirt Moussa, a village of great beauty on the northern flanks of the Djurdjura Mountains.   His father had been living and working in France for the past ten years and so he grew up among women, strong women, the kind who can bear the responsibility of raising a family and keeping a home without their men around in the midst of a full blown war.  It was also the women of Matoub’s childhood, especially his mother Aldja and his grandmother, who mixed music with the blood in his veins.  Music-making went on everywhere, at work in the fields during the day, at home in the evenings, at weddings, henna feasts, parties; music and old Berber tales of Kings and princes, heroes and villains.  Matoub’s mother was illiterate, but like many Kabyles she possessed a trove of rich and evocative words with which to paint the world.

From the start ‘trouble’ was Matoub’s middle name.  School was death by boredom and he preferred to be off in the fields with his mates, trapping rabbits and running wild.  “I made the bush school into a way of life,” he wrote.  Nevertheless he did appreciate the way in which the French Christian Fathers who ran many rural schools in Kabylia would inculcate a sense of Berber history and identity, along with many of the positive aspects of French culture and thought, into the minds of their young charges.  Matoub’s schooling was entirely in French, and at home he spoke only Tamazight.  He never learned more than a few words of Arabic in his whole life.   This preponderance of French teachers in Kabylia and the fact that it was French historians and French philologists who did much to revive the study of Berber poetry, languages and the ancient Tifinagh alphabet in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, lead many a staunch Arab nationalist to claim that “the Berber is a creation of colonialism.”   Despite his respect for certain French teachers however and like many a young boy in the Kabyle Mountains, Matoub venerated the freedom fighters, the mujaheddin of the Independence struggle, who would sneak into the village late and night and pay their visits.   They were heroes, and the war of Liberation was a heroic struggle.   There was no doubt about that in Matoub’s mind.  The shelter that the impenetrable contours of their territory gave to the freedom fighters was Kabylia’s pride.

One day on the way back from school the young Matoub saw the bodies of three men hanging from a tree.  They were harkis, the name given by Algerians to traitors who collaborated with the French, and they had been executed by the mujaheddin.  Their skin was already black and sun-cracked.  Flies covered their eyes and faces, buzzing morosely in the evening heat.  The sight of these strange fruit stayed lodged in Matoub’s mind for the rest of his life.  It was his first encounter with death; close, intimate and real.   A haunting life-long flirtation had begun.

Matoub belonged to the generation of Algerians who grew up believing that their Revolution was a beacon for the world.  It was one of the greatest victories of a colonized people over its colonizers that the late 20^th century ever saw.  During the 1960s, Algeria seduced many into thinking it was model socialist state, a dynamo of new thinking and new ideas and a natural leader along with Cuba of non-aligned nations everywhere.  Che Guevara and Fidel Castro came to visit.  The youth were proud to be Algerian and free.   But under the surface, trouble was brewing.  For many Kabyles, Aït Ahmed’s uprising of 1964 had a traumatic effect, radicalising them and making them reject all things Arabic.  The result of this failed adventure was that Berbers became pariahs in their own country, afraid to speak their own language except in staunchly Berber enclaves.  The forced Arabisation of schools in 1968 was also traumatic.  Many, like Matoub, who spoke only Berber or French, were effectively robbed of their education.   In order to fill the vacancies left by sacked French teachers, the state had to import thousands of second-rate teachers from Egypt and Syria, who taught in a Middle Eastern form of Arabic, which hardly anyone understood.   This blind and destructive policy broke the momentum of a generation.  “It was then that Algeria’s descent into hell began then,” wrote Matoub.

Matoub’s own revolutionary dream finally turned into a nightmare when he was sent to Oran for his compulsory military service in 1975.  Algeria had just provoked a war with Morocco over the question of the Western Sahara.  Matoub saw Moroccan families, with many fellow Berbers among them, being rounded up and forcibly evicted from their homes in Oran and western Algeria and sent back over the border.  The treatment they received disgusted him.   Army life itself was a nightmare.   Matoub witnessed the cynical corruption of the high command and officer ranks.  He also suffered the prejudice of his fellow Arab conscripts.  His lack of Arabic and his Kabyle origins marked him out and attracted a plethora of insults: ‘peasant’, ‘yokel’, ‘backwoods kid’, ‘enemy of national unity’, ‘traitor’ and ‘idiot’.   Boumedienne’s secret police lurked in every dingy hole and corner.  The heroic vision of the great Algerian revolutionary army, scourge of the coloniser, liberator of the people, father and unifier of the nation, dissolved into nothing.   Matoub came away more disgusted, disillusioned and rebellious than ever.

For solace and mental survival, Matoub began to compose poems.  Back in Taourirt Moussa he had already made himself a guitar out of an old oilcan, a length of wood and some fishing tackle.  He mastered a few songs and even started playing at parties and gatherings.   When Matoub’s father eventually came back from years of economic exile to settle down with his family, he bought a beautiful mandole with him, a kind of large elongated mandolin popular in modern Kabyle music, as a gift for his son.  It had been bought with Matoub senior’s hard earned cash at the Paul Beuscher music shop in Paris.  Matoub was so awed by this splendid object that he didn’t even dare touch it for a while.   Eventually, with the help of some older local musicians, he began to master the instrument and even build a lively local reputation as a party and café entertainer.   However Matoub was also a regular at the card table and after a particularly bad run at poker he lost the mandole on a busted flush.  The shame was excruciating, but honour bound him to pay the debt.  His father was broken by the news.

This one dolorous little tale paints Matoub in all his vividness and darkness.  His wayward heart ruled his hand, and his mouth too.  In fact ‘Big Mouth’ was a title that would attach itself doggedly to him throughout his life.  His mouth made him many enemies, but it was also the vehicle of his greatness.  For him, pain, shame, danger and fear were there to be tested, confronted and then just brushed aside if they became too much of a barrier to living a full life.   An almost savage passion drove Matoub’s inner engine, spurred by a quick-fire temper.

In ‘Rebelle’, Matoub talks of an incident in a barber’s shop, when he sliced someone with a razor for some lost insult.  He was given two nights detention in a local jail and then brought in front of the magistrate.  “Because you are a minor I will release you, but I never want to see you again.  Have you anything to say for yourself,” said the magistrate.  “Have you got a spare cigarette?” asked Matoub.   The answer was one month in jail for contempt of court.  That was Matoub, a rare combination of intensity, cheek, courage and foolishness.   ‘Rebelle’ is a striking self-portrait inasmuch as Matoub’s failings and weaknesses are never glossed over but constantly revealed and even underlined with a kind of devil-may-care honesty.


* * * *

Exile in Paris and The Berber Spring

After the army had crushed his dreams, and life in Kabylia seemed to offer no future for a young man with a stunted education and a head full of songs and poems – all in Tamazight too which ruled out a career as a public performer in Algeria – Matoub did what so many Kabyles had done before; he left for France.  In the town of Annemasse in the French Alps he was astonished to discover that he could earn money, good money, by playing his songs in émigré cafés.   Soon after he moved to Paris where he slowly became a fixture in the cultural life of the ex-pat Kabyle community, playing in cafés and hanging out.  Idir, who was probably the most famous Kabyle singer alive at the time thanks to his enormous international hit ‘A Vava Inouva’, took Matoub under his wing, showed him the ropes and even gave him shelter when it was needed.

In a recent interview Idir gave an intriguing character assessment of his former protégé:  “It wasn’t so much his activist side which interested me.  It was above all his intimate side, the suffering and the inner pain.  That’s the part of him I liked.  I saw that he was a man, more in the ilk of Verlaine, in his non-conformism and in his ambiguities too.  Later he came to be considered a myth, hero, a brigade commander.  But that intimate side of him could be felt in certain songs, a side that had nothing to do with being militant and everything to do with the wounds of the heart.   He had this sensitive streak which was the root of his talent. ”

Not long after he arrived in Paris, Matoub attended a concert of Kabyle music at La Mutualité.  There he met one of his great heroes, the singer Slimane Azem, who, along with Cheikh El Hasnaoui, was responsible for laying the foundations of modern popular Kabyle music in the 1950s and ‘60s.  Like most Kabyles of his generation, Matoub had grown up in the thrall of these two singers and his meeting with Azem was charged with emotion and wonder.  The foundation of Matoub’s music are the Kabyle songs of Azem and Hasnaoui, amongst others, and chaabi, or the popular music of Algiers which dominated Muslim tastes in Algeria until the 1970s and even beyond.  “I’m following in the steps of Cheikh El Hasnaoui,” he once told the Le Matin newspaper.  “The precision, the accuracy in his tempo and scales dazzle me.  Technically I belong to him.  But in terms of the message, I’m closer to Slimane Azem and to the spirit of rebellion in his music.  Chaabi was also the music of my childhood.  I feel myself gliding when I hear El Anka or Fadela Dziriya.” Mohammed Hadj El Anka and Fadila Dziriya are among the greatest chaabi singers ever.

But the truth was that no previous Kabyle singer had gone as far as Matoub wanted to go in terms of the simplicity, power and provocation of his lyrics.  “When I started, modern songs didn’t carry that need to express anger,” he once said.   “They didn’t have any convincing protest lyrics.  I shouted out my anger in my songs.  Music is my anger.”   Many Algerian journalists who wrote about Matoub’s music often referred to the ‘violence’ of his songs.  To a western ear his lyrics don’t seem violent, just challenging in the manner of early Bob Dylan or Billy Bragg.  But their bare-knuckled spirit of confrontation is extreme in a North African context, where musicians and songwriters had always previously pulled back from head on confrontation, and couched their protest in rich and symbolic imagery.  That wasn’t Matoub’s style.  His words came from his own mountain world, simple, unadorned, rich in their colours and allusions, but often stark in their meaning.  “I don’t censor myself,” he once said bluntly.

Fame followed fast on the heels of the release of Matoub’s first album ‘Ay Izem’ (‘The Lion’) in 1978.   By 1980, he was already headlining Paris’ legendary venue L’Olympia, scene of memorable visits by the Rolling Stones, James Brown, Edith Piaf and Genesis among many others.   It was almost as if the timing of the concert was divinely ordained.   Trouble had been brewing back home in Kabylia towards the end of 1979 and the early part of 1980.  The political submissiveness that had descended like a blanket of lead on the territory after the defeat of the uprising in 1964 was finally beginning to lift and crack.  In the end, typically, it was a cultural contretemps that lit the fuse.

The revered Kabyle writer and Berberist, Mouloud Mammeri, was due to give a lecture on traditional Berber poetry at the University of Tizi Ouzou.  At the last moment the authorities sniffed Berberist subversion and banned the lecture.  The resulting student protests grew into an all out revolt, which was brutally repressed by the security forces and denounced by the new President Chadli Benjedid.   Over thirty people were killed and more than 200 injured.  This uprising, which became known as the ‘Berber Spring’, was enormously significant.  It was the first overtly popular large-scale show of dissent since Algerian independence.  It radicalised a generation and the anniversary of the uprising on April 20^th each year, known as ‘Tafsut’ in Berber, has become a day of protests, marches, parties, gatherings and celebrations ever since.   Kabyles felt that they were the conscience of the Algerian nation, expressing the anger and frustration not only of Berbers but of all Algerians.   Like Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland or the Soweto Uprising in South Africa, the Berber Spring was a pivotal event which strengthened the political sinews of the Kabyle nation and boiled the passions of its people.

In the midst of the uprising Matoub took the stage of L’Olympia dressed in army fatigues, thereby expressing his solidarity with the “war” that was raging in his homeland.  The event was highly charged.  The Berber Spring elevated the new breed of Kabyle singers, “the guerrillas of song” as the Kabyle writer Kateb Yacine called them, to a status of extraordinary power.  Due to the lack of any credible coverage or analysis of events in the state-controlled Algerian media, Kabyles in France were forced to rely on ex-pat Berber publications and the odd radio station to keep them abreast of the unfolding drama.   But for inspiration, insight, zeal and courage they turned to singers like Matoub Lounès, Ferhat Mehenni, Aït Menguellet, Djamel Allam and Idir.  They were the bards of the gathering revolt.  They were the pied pipers of the movement.   After Mitterand’s election as President of France in 1980, a new system of political and cultural associations became available to immigrant populations.  This new opportunity spawned the ‘Beur’ movement, a flowering of North African culture, politics and media in the old colony, France.  New radio stations, newspapers, theatre groups, publishing houses, sporting clubs, record labels and community groups appeared like blooms after a flash flood, offering new channels of information and cultural education which allowed Algerians to circumvent the oppressive state control of culture and media back at home.

Matoub Lounès rode this wave like a rebel surfer.  His plainly spoken words of revolt hit the bull’s eye of the times.  His message was clear and passionate.  North Africans, especially young Berbers, fed on that clarity and that passion.   A reviewer who attended one of a series of nine Matoub Lounès concerts at L’Atlas in Paris in the early 1990s, wrote in Parcours Maghrebin, “How does one describe the perfect symbiosis between the artist on stage with an audience completely dedicated to a cause…  The concerts of Lounès have the grandeur of a rite, a rite full of flowers which are offered every ten minutes by overwhelmed fans.  The presence of Matoub at L’Atlas, a total event in itself, has brought a ray of hope to people crushed by the cost of living, the riots, the deadly raids, corruption and the proliferation of ills in our country.  Cheikh Lounès sings about their pains and their hopes which have been tragically blighted thanks to a system made gangrenous by a bunch of criminals.”

As the eighties progressed Matoub’s big mouth also had occasion to make life intensely exciting and dangerous for all the wrong reasons.  Once he picked a fight with a music producer who owed him money.   The producer’s insults had to be avenged – Kabylia and Corsica have worryingly similar attitudes to revenge and retribution.   Matoub rushed up to his hotel room and fetched a knife while the producer ranted in the lobby.  During the ensuing street brawl Matoub stabbed the producer in the abdomen.  He thought he’d killed him.  He was arrested, beaten, showered with racist abuse by the police and spent one month in La Santé prison in Paris.  A few years later Matoub wrote a song denouncing the London Accords between Ben Bella and Aït Ahmed, two men who had fought each other mercilessly in the early sixties but had now decided to make up for purely pragmatic reasons.  Matoub felt that this “false reconciliation” was a betrayal.   The left-wing Libération newspaper called Matoub a fascist and accused him of wanting to throw the Arabs into the sea.   Matoub couldn’t find a single producer in the North African music community who would release the album featuring the song.  All of them received threats not to touch it.   In the end a Tunisian Jew agreed to put it out.  It was deleted soon afterwards and has never been available since.  A few weeks later Matoub was shot at by a group of North Africans in a passing car in the rue d’Amsterdam.


* * * *

Five Bullets and The Dangers of Homesickness

Despite these unnerving incidents, Matoub Lounès might still be alive today if he had only desisted from visiting Algeria.  But homesickness was an unbearable affliction, as it was for many Kabyles.  “That country is my refuge, my bolt hole, my consolation and the only place where I feel really good,” he wrote in ‘Rebelle’.  The problem with going back however was that Matoub was now famous in his home country, despite the fact that RTA, the national Algerian state-owned radio and TV company, never ever broadcast his music until the day of his death when they suddenly realised that they didn’t possess a single piece of live footage, studio recording or taped interview of one of the greatest Algerian singers who ever lived.   However, thanks to the ‘alternative’ media of cheap cassettes and French associative radio stations, Matoub’s fan base among young Kabyles and other Algerians in Algeria itself was now huge.   But fame in Algeria was a dangerous, even deadly curse when it brought you notoriety among the security forces, the government and the Islamists as a troublemaker, a shit stirrer and a no-good protest singer.

Matoub experienced the downside of his fame in a very dramatic way in October of 1988.  It was a time of radical unrest when the tectonic plates of Algerian society were shifting in the most explosive way and immense geysers of dissent were spurting up everywhere.  On October 9th, Matoub decided to join a group of students in front of Tizi Ouzou University to distribute flyers calling for a two-day national strike in support of rioting students and workers in Algiers.  Together with a couple of students, Matoub then decided to drive to the nearby town of Aïn el Hammam to distribute more flyers there.  On they way they stopped passing trucks and cars to hand out more flyers.  All of a sudden a police car appeared in front of them, speeded past and then turned and sped after them.  After a brief chase along the snaking mountain roads, Matoub, innocently expecting nothing more than a verbal drubbing or a bit of rough stuff at the local gendarmerie, stopped the car and confronted them.  When he saw that they were from the quasi-military Défence Nationale, rather than the somewhat more lenient local police, Matoub began to worry.  He was handcuffed and treated to a broadside of abuse from his furious pursuers.  Then suddenly, without any clear cause or reason, one of the policemen took out his revolver and shot Matoub in the arm, after which he emptied four more rounds into the body of the horrified and astounded singer.  Matoub collapsed.  He was taken to Aïn el Hammam, every bump in the road doubling his agony, and then to the hospital in Tizi Ouzou.  After three days he was evacuated to the Clinique des Orangers in Algiers, a city still smouldering with unrest.

Matoub’s body was a wreck.  One of the bullets had sliced through his intestine and shattered his right femur.  The under-equipped and hygienically atrocious Algerian health service was in no position to put him back together again and their interventions often made matters worse.  Infections multiplied and Matoub spent his days in constant and excruciating pain.  The nurses started to administer Dolossal, a morphine based painkiller, to which Matoub eventually became addicted.  He also had to cope with deep depression, black moods, and moments when he just wanted to destroy everything in sight.  Eventually, after tortuous bureaucratic wranglings and needless, not to say intentional, delays, Matoub was given a permit to evacuate to Paris.  There, with better treatment, his recovery gathered momentum, although morphine-deprivation drove him to the brink of despair.  His scars were atrocious.  One of his legs was badly set after an operation in Algiers and it ended up measuring five centimetres shorter than other.  He would limp for the rest of his life.   And to cap it all, his bowels and intestine were permanently damaged, forcing him to carry around a colostomy bag, an indignity which the proud and sensitive Matoub bore with extreme difficulty.   It was only the ardent and sustained support of Matoub’s family and his fans, together with the time spent singing and composing songs that saved his sanity through the long months of recuperation.  In Algiers he received literally hundreds of well-wishers by his bed-side, and many more letters and gifts from far and wide.

Those five bullets sublimated his reputation, turning him from a popular singer with a big mouth into an existential hero, a man who had danced cheek to cheek with death, and whose words thereafter carried special magnetism and power.  As murder and violence became daily facts of Algerian life, Matoub was the one singer who could speak of its horrors from direct personal experience.  People loved and venerated him for that.  He was no longer a theoretical artist, but one who knew pain and suffering as intimately as it was possible without loosing a life.   “When one has flirted so closely with death,” he wrote in ‘Rebelle’, “you feel this kind of debt which obliges you to respect life.  Suffering, it’s true, helps to appreciate happiness.”

After six weeks at the Beaujon hospital in Paris, Matoub discharged himself and went back to Kabylia with his crutches and colostomy sack, to perform at an emotional concert in Tizi Ouzou’s football stadium.  Such was his defiant headstrong gluttony for life and its inevitable punishments.  “Aggression, which could have annihilated me, ended up reinforcing me.  That day I knew that the five bullets of Aïn El Hamman were defeated,” he wrote.  Needless to say, the cop who had almost murdered Matoub was never brought to trial.


* * * *

Fundamentalism and the Descent into Hell

Meanwhile Algeria was plunging into hell.   When oil and gas prices plummeted in the mid 1980s, the country’s only real source of hard currency dwindled.  The state could no longer pay its bills and what had always been a fragile society, even at the best of times, began to disintegrate.  Forced by the massive nation-wide unrest of 1988 to take drastic measures, President Chadli Benjedid announced the first free multi-party presidential and parliamentary elections since independence.  The first round was held in December 1991.  The voter turnout was low, with many Algerians decidedly unenthused by the choices on offer. The Front Islamique du Salud (FIS), an ascendant fundamentalist Islamic party led by the imprisoned Abassi Madani and Ali Benhadj, won an overwhelming victory.

Like many extremist political organisations, the FIS offered simplistic starry-eyed solutions to complex deep-rooted problems.  Their ultimate goal was clear; an Islamic state run according to the precepts of sharia law in which democracy, the rights of women and the aspirations of ethnic minorities would have absolutely no place at all.  This programme held definite attractions for certain sections of a population crushed by years of poverty, corruption, and the mismanagement of the one-party FLN state.  It also seemed to provide an alternative to failed western ideologies like socialism and communism, an alternative that was defiantly Arabic and Islamic.  The more oppressed and socially deprived a people, the more inclined they are to cling to the rock of an unambiguous and proud identity, however bogus it may be. The FIS seemed to provide the answer to people’s needs, although many votes cast in their favour were more like gut rejections of the previous regime than positive endorsements of their programme.  The FIS were also masters of grass-roots organisation and they used mosques and religiously inspired welfare programmes to seduce the populace.

But in the fundamentalist mind, democracy is a heresy and a sin against God.  The first-round victory of the FIS presented the Army generals, who still held ultimate power in Algeria, with an excruciating dilemma.  Should they allow the second round of the elections to go ahead and thereby herald a fully-fledged Islamic state in Algeria?  Should they let democracy destroy democracy?  Was it worth sacrificing their own political dominance for a democracy that they had never felt comfortable with anyway?  The strong man of the ruling army council, Major-General Khaled Nezzar, had little doubt in his mind.  He purposefully provoked a constitutional crisis by forcing Chadli Benjedid to resign and appointed a High State Council to rule in his place.  Their first act in office was to annul the second round of elections.  It was a military coup d’etat, all in the name of democracy.  The FIS and their followers felt cheated and robbed.  The political system had betrayed them.  The time had come for direct action.  The gun, the bomb and the knife took over from the ballot box and the Islamic movement went underground.

Matoub had even less love for fundamentalist Islam than he did for Arabic nationalism.  “I’m neither an Arab nor a Muslim,” he once famously said in TV documentary, in a blatant refutation of the FLN’s rallying cry at independence; “One Nation – Algeria!  One People – The Arabs!   One Faith – Islam!”   As far as Matoub was concerned, the fundamentalists wanted to destroy anything that might help society evolve; intellectuals, doctors, journalists, teachers, young women who refuse the veil and of course, musicians.  The FIS and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) were unequivocal in their view that music is a sin and musicians are enemies of God.   Furthermore, Matoub liked to drink.  He loved spending time in cafés, chatting to friends.  It was his way of keeping touch with the people he loved most.  None of this helped to improve his image as a good Muslim.   In any case, he had never had any time for the marabouts, or holy men, who controlled traditional Kabyle society, preying on the simple faith of the people and enriching themselves in the process.  He suspected them of aiding and abetting Islamic terrorism in Kabylia and beyond.  “Religion exploits consciences,” he wrote.  “I don’t want it to exploit mine.”


* * * *

The Only One who Lived to Tell the Tale

Although Matoub spent a lot of his time in France and touring abroad with the help of an international network of Berber groups and activists, he could never stay away from Kabylia for long, and he always tried to be there for the annual ‘Tafsut’ celebrations commemorating the Berber Spring.  In 1994, when fundamentalist terrorist violence was reaching its murderous apogee, Matoub began to hear rumours that he was on the terrorists’ black list.  Friends urged him to go back to the safety of Paris.  Posters began to appear in Tizi Ouzou proclaiming that Matoub was next.  But he bluntly and stubbornly refused to leave.  It would look too much like a climb down, a loss of courage and a defeat.  Instead he took the precaution of avoiding main roads, where the GIA often set up false roadblocks.  But he still went to cafés to talk and drink late into the night with friends.

One night in late September, Matoub and a couple of friends were driving back to Tizi Ouzou when they decided to stop off at a road-side café for a pick me up.   All of sudden, fifteen men armed with knives, hunting rifles and sawn off shotguns burst into the bar.   They searched the place, pistol-whipping the proprietor with the warning that if he continued to run such an ungodly business he would be shot.   Eventually they found the gun that Matoub kept for self-protection in his belt.  The cry went up.  “It’s him. It’s Matoub!”   Their leader, whose war name was Hamza, said to Matoub, “Now you’re getting ready to die, have you decided to pray?”  “Obviously,” replied Matoub.  “Lounès,” came the stern answer, “it’s better to be alive and scared than heroic and dead.”   After taking the proceeds of the till and beating some of the other clients, the guerrillas departed into the rainy night with Matoub.

No one had ever survived being kidnapped by the GIA.  Throughout the two weeks of Matoub’s captivity, death was a constant presence.  His own execution seemed to be forever only a few hours away.  The young members of the GIA group who were holding him captive spoke about death all the time.  They revelled in it, boasted about it and glorified it.  They were also completely resigned to the idea of their own martyrdom in the cause of Islam and subsequent entry into paradise.  Matoub was astounded by how little political analysis or discourse went on in the stinking remote mountain camps of the GIA.  The will of God was the simple motivation behind their every thought and the justification of their every action.   Matoub felt his only possible survival strategies were wit and cunning.  He even joined in with the tearful prayer sessions which the guerrillas held five times a day.

Eventually Matoub was tried by two ‘Emirs’, or GIA leaders, and sentenced to death.  His trial was recorded on tape, so that his own expedient contradictions of his core beliefs could be used later to discredit him.  His judges had an intimate knowledge of his poems and lyrics, even though they claimed that they never listened to his music, or any music for that matter.   “You are the enemy of God,” they told him.  “Because of you and your songs, Kabylia is wallowing in darkness.”   Their arguments were simple and without nuance.   They urged him to follow the example of Cat Stevens, aka Youssef Islam, who had renounced the ungodly life of a musician and embraced the true faith.  Paradise awaited him if he started praying and adopted Islam.  Looking down the barrel of a gun, proverbially and literally, Matoub said anything to stay alive.  He promised to give up singing and open a respectable business, to which end the guerrillas in turn offered to lend him some money.   He also promised that he would try and persuade the Berber movement to give up its political aims.

In the second week of his captivity Matoub began to hear rumours that he might be released.  He refused to believe them, and kept telling himself that death was nothing to fear because he was dead already.  Part of him suspected that the GIA might be planning to manipulate his popularity and use his taped promises and declarations to influence his fans.  As part of this scheme they might just want him alive.  But mostly it was death that dominated his thoughts.  He pictured his own end obsessively, in the minutest detail.  “I imagined my assassination one hundred times,” he wrote.  “One hundred times, I lived my own death.”  A captured policeman was executed only ten feet away from him.  His captors considered Matoub responsible for the moral degeneration of Kabylia and they had fun playing games with his state of mind.

Eventually, on October 10^th, Matoub was driven to the village of Ath Yenni and released.  His joy and relief were unbounded.  After rejoining his family in Taourirt Moussa, where thousands of well-wishers gathered to greet him, Matoub began to find out what had happened during his absence.  The MCB had sent an ultimatum to the GIA, threatening all out war if Matoub was killed.  Groups of youths had braved the dangers of the remote mountain areas to look for him.  Tens of thousands took to the street of Tizi Ouzou and Algiers chanting “Matoub or the Gun!”   In the end, his execution was too hot, even for the GIA to handle.  Matoub was unequivocal about the significance of his own escape from the clutches of the fanatics.  “My liberation was their first set back,” he wrote.  “The terrorists freed me because they had no choice…  For the first time a whole region mobilised, arms in hand, to show that they would not give in to intimidation…  My songs, my music, my struggle will be even stronger now.”


* * * *

The Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Soon afterwards, Matoub released his album ‘Kenza’.  It was dedicated to the daughter of the Kabyle writer Tahar Djaout, a close friend of Matoub’s, who was murdered by the GIA in 1993.  Life, precarious as it was, went on.  Matoub now suffered from regular panic attacks for which he took valium.  Composing songs and writing his autobiography ‘Rebelle’ were the only forms of therapy he allowed himself.  Of course, his traumatic encounter with the GIA had been far from unique.  It is estimated that almost 200,000 people were murdered in Algeria in the decade after 1992.  But the fact that he was able to express his experiences and feelings in songs of such clarity and power set him apart.  “The essential thing for me is to fulfil the link between my life and my ideas, my struggle and my songs,” he wrote.  “My life is a permanent search for that equilibrium, from which I take my strength and my inspiration.”

Nothing in Algerian politics is simple and pure unsullied Algerian heroes are almost non-existent.  Matoub had his doubters and his enemies.  In the early 1990s the Berber movement had split into two factions.  One supported Aït Ahmed’s FFS party and the other a new political movement called Rassemblement pour La Culture et la Démocratie (RCD).  The FFS believed that ultimately peace and stability could only be won through dialogue with the FIS and other fundamentalist groups.  The RCD rejected this notion outright, and even went so far as to ally itself with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and the army Generals in favour of an all out war on religious fanaticism and terrorism.  Kabyle society split along these party lines, turning neighbour against neighbour and friend against friend.  Matoub always claimed that he was a poet and that political machinations held no interest for him.  Nevertheless he was a fervent and declared admirer of Saïd Sadi, the man who had founded the Mouvement Culturel Berbère (MCB) in the late 1960s and was also behind the creation of the RCD in the late 1980s.  Matoub was an MCB loyalist through and through.  “It represents that which is most important for us Kabyles: our identity,” he declared.  By association, he was also considered to be an RCD supporter, and this dragged him into the political fray, despite himself.

Soon after Matoub was released by the GIA and the joyous celebrations in Kabylia, Algiers, Paris and the rest of the Diaspora had died down, dark mutterings began to be heard.  Certain parties accused Matoub of ‘staging’ his own kidnap, in order to enhance his reputation and that of the RCD.  For them it was the only logical explanation for Matoub’s escape from the GIA, an organisation whose record of murdering all their kidnap victims had been hitherto watertight.  The singer Ferhat expressed his own doubts publicly, and many others did so privately.  With great insight, the journalist Catherine Simon, writing in Libération, pointed out that doubt was one of the few political reactions left to the Algerian people.  “In this theatre of shadows into which evil has plunged the country,” she wrote, “the only freedom left to the populace, pressured to choose between one camp or another, is to doubt, without let up, everything and everybody.”

Aït Meguellet, a singer revered by many Kabyles and Algerians, refused to comment on Matoub’s kidnapping when pressed by journalists.  For Matoub, his silence was a grave insult.  He went onto Beur FM, the biggest North African radio station in France, and accused Aït Meguellet, who continued to reside in Kabylia throughout the troubles, of buying his own protection from the GIA.  Matoub even claimed to have proof of this arrangement.  The normally reserved Aït Meguellet went public and denounced Matoub, accusing him of mythomania and megalomania.  “In the future, for each proffered lie, ten truths will be told about his person,” he said.

This sorry debacle became known as the Matoub affair.  Claim and counter-claim dogged him right up until the day of his death and beyond.  The French TV channel Canal+ even broadcast a documentary throwing doubt on the assumption that the GIA were Matoub’s killers.  Matoub’s sister Malika, and the Matoub Lounès Foundation are still trying to expose the dark forces which they claim were responsible for his eventual murder.  Ironically, her suspicions are focused on the RCD, the one political party which Matoub was supposed to have supported during his life.  Her argument is that since the RCD allied itself with the regime, it had the means and the motivation to eradicate her brother.  The party was only doing the government’s dirty business for them.  Once again Malika claims to have evidence to back up her accusations.  The RCD are suing her and the Matoub Lounès Foundation.  The case continues.

It’s easy to imagine the army Generals, the mafia who rule Algeria, rubbing their hands in glee at all this fractious in-fighting at the heart of the Berber movement.  And despite his natural tendency to mouth off and call a spade a spade, it’s equally hard to imagine that Matoub himself would have looked on this controversy with anything other than frustration and despair.  All Kabyles, whether FFS or RCD, share a similar dream and ultimately it’s the dream that suffers while the accusations fly.  But that’s the nature of crime and punishment in modern Algeria.  Army, FIS, Government, GIA, this party, that party – they all sometimes blend into one deathly and impenetrable medusa.   As the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscínski wrote way back in the 1960s; “Algeria is unique.  At every moment it reveals its contrasts, its contradictions and its conflicts.  Nothing is unambiguous and nothing fits into a formula.”

A perspicacious journalist once wrote that Matoub’s final end was like “the chronicle of a death foretold.”  People thought he was mad to even contemplate returning to Algeria.  They even told him so.  But Matoub couldn’t stay away from his beloved Kabylia for very long.  After he had put the final touches to what became his last album “Lettre ouverte aux…”, the thirty sixth of his career, he decided to accompany his new wife Nadja back home, in order to help her get a visa.  He knew the risks he was taking.  “I know I have been reprieved,” he wrote.  “Popular pressure saved me from the nightmare.  Next time my kidnappers will have my skin, and without any warning, of that I’m certain.”  But in the end, for Matoub, risks were just like red rags to a bull.  Contrary and stubborn to the last, Matoub turned a deaf ear to all the warnings and travelled back home for his final rendez-vous with death.  Ensnared like a brave but doomed insect in a tangled web of fate and foreboding, Matoub Lounès climbed into the car with his wife and her two sisters, and drove off up that lonely mountain road.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2003
First published in ‘Shoot The Singer! Music Censorship Today’ Zed Books, London, May 2004

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