After that inaugural project in 2006, the French actress and director Melissa Wainhouse, a long-standing member of La Calma, returned regularly to Kidal, despite the growing threat of kidnapping and always against the advice of the French foreign ministry. After 2009, the trip could only be made with an escort of bodyguards. She continued to develop short sketches with what had now become a solid core of actors from the Kidal region, both Touareg and Songhoi.

The murder of the British tourist Edwin Dyer by Abou Zeid and his AQIM militia in June of 2009 impregnated the entire northern two thirds of Mali with a heightened sense of danger and paranoia. 2010 was in effect the year that the region shut down to the outside world. Nonetheless, in January 2010, Wainhouse and the players from Tisrawt managed to defy the cowering zeitgeist and perform at the Camel Festival in Tessalit, a beautiful village in the far north east of Mali up by the Algerian border. They also travelled to the Festival in the Desert in Essakane. This was to be Melissa’s last visit to the Kidal region before the Islamist occupation of 2012.

Nonetheless, as far as Melissa was concerned, being barred from Tisrawt’s home region wasn’t reason enough to shelve the whole project. “The only solution was for the actors themselves to come to Bamako,” she told me in September 2012. “It isn’t an easy task to transport six people from Kidal to Bamako, to house them, feed them and create the right conditions for working.” And it wasn’t just the logistics that were challenging; it was the novelty of the project itself. “There are no Touareg actors apart from ours and no Touareg theatre troupe apart from Tisrawt,” Melissa told me. “But because we were extremely persistent and desirous of success, bit by bit, there was a gathering awareness amongst Touareg leaders and notables of the importance of the work of these young people and what it meant symbolically, even if the troupe wasn’t on a professional level yet. It was too early to talk about professionalism but the very fact that these young Kidalois were getting involved and setting themselves the goal of transmitting messages in French and Tamashek through theatre, messages of peace, was important enough in itself.”

Whilst the north degenerated into a lawless playground for mafia business and Salafists with AK47s, Tisrawt tackled issues such as trafficking, crime and banditry. At the end of one particular sketch that revolved around these themes, the players would turn to their audience and declare that it was up to them, the Touareg, the northerners, to preserve and value their own culture. It was up to the teenagers and parents of teenagers in the audience to make sure that smuggling and crime didn’t destroy society itself. That sketch was performed at the inauguration of the Biennale Artistique et Culturelle in Sikasso in 2010, in front of President Amadou Toumani Touré and a large gathering of dignitaries.

In 2011, Tisrawt received funding from Norwegian Church Aid (AEN) to prepare a new show that would tour the three regions of the north; Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal. A programme of writing, rehearsals and workshops was organised in Bamako, involving professional actors and technicians from La Calma. The ambition was to take Tisrawt to a new level of proficiency and give them the impetus and know-how to carry on developing their art on their own. Nevertheless, with the tumultuous build up to the outbreak of hostilities in northern Mali in January 2012, the tour, which was due to visit schools, cultural centres and festivals in the north, never happened.

The scuppering of Tisrawt’s first opportunity to do a well- funded and well-prepared tour was a severe blow. The group had been gearing up to tackling the hardest topic of all; religious extremism. But in the end, with the cancellation of the tour, the opportunity passed. When I spoke to Melissa in September 2012, she was getting ready to go back to Bamako to start a new project with the troupe. Religious extremism was still on top of the list of potential themes for the next phase of work. “Will we tackle the subject of Islamism? Right now I can’t say yes or no. It will really depend on the members of the troupe. Luckily theatre allows us to deal with subjects in a symbolic or transposed way, but having said that, the subject is so sensitive. The most important thing for me is not to put them in any danger.”

The outbreak of rebellion in January 2012 turned Tisrawt upside down. “In a profound way it was a complete shock,” according to Melissa. “Some of the actors took refuge in Bamako and were living a very precarious situation there. Some stayed in Kidal, and were probably caught up in the reality of what was going on. They were sucked into that spiral. I think that right now [ed. September 2012] the youth up there in the north have a very stark choice. If they stay they are forced to ally themselves to one or other of the various movements. Some just don’t have the means or the opportunity to leave, because families can’t go with them for diverse reasons. You have to realise that this youth wasn’t old enough to have been combatants in the rebellion of the 1990s. They were children at the time, but they have been soaked in that whole climate, a climate in which taking up arms has always been a noble act. That is very cultural with the Tamashek. But what’s incredible is that I’m in touch with all of them. I’ve managed to gather my troupe together and all of them tell me that their aim, their only glimmer of hope, is the work of the company.”

It was the actors themselves who urged Melissa to let them go and perform in the refugee camps in front of people who have been driven from their homes by the conflict. “Their aim is to make them laugh, to bring them hope and given them a feeling of solidarity and to value their culture, which is in extreme danger right now.”

So, in an indistinct fog of crisis and instability, Melissa gathered her players together in Bamako in November 2012 and started work on a new piece called Tisrawt “Le Royaume d’Idjirane”. It was about a king who considers himself to be a good king. His motto is “Each man for himself, and everyone for the king.” Nonetheless, there’s trouble ahead. Drought descends and the harvests are bad. The royal council is convened to try and sort out the crisis. One day a stranger called Albana (‘Misfortune’ in Tamashek) arrives and announces that a spring called ‘Goulou Goulou’ is situated right there, under the king’s throne. He sows calamity and chaos by pitting one person against the other and manipulating the king. His aim is to make the riches of the kingdom his own. Tisrawt was a star attraction at the 2012 Festival des Théatre de Réalités in Bamako.

“Tisrawt is a microcosm of Touareg society,” Melissa explains. “That’s to say, it is a group of people who come from many different clans. Some are pro-MNLA. Some are pro Ansar ud-Dine. Some are pro-Mali. Others say that it’s all nonsense. And the aim is to understand each other, to live together and work together on a common project.”

The Tisrawt threat group is just a beginning, albeit a powerful and promising one. The actors are learning their trade. They’re hacking a new trail. “You know, new Touareg bands have it much easier because Tinariwen have already opened up and mapped out the onward path,” Melissa said. “They’re examples, sentinels, who have reached at least some of their goals. For my actors that doesn’t exist yet. They don’t have a culture of the theatre. They don’t have access to everything that we have access to here in Europe; festivals, books, films. I have to operate at their rhythm. And I’m there, their mother, their sister and their teacher. I’m also their artistic director and I’m determined not to let them become the instrument of another person or entity, nor of the chaos the political chaos that the country is in right now.”

Heroism is a loud word. It becomes more dignified in its quiet, barely visible incarnations. That quiet heroism exists everywhere, in Mali too, abundant in its obscurity. The quiet courage and dedication of people like Adama Traore, Melissa Wainhouse and the actors in Tisrawt and all the many other small theatre troupes in the country is keeping discourse, culture, education, entertainment and hope alive.

Theatre, in its simplest incarnations at least, costs relatively little. That’s why it has power as folk art and as a simple means of bringing problems out into the open where they can be discussed, understood and possibly tackled. In a country like Mali, a country that urgently needs to speak to itself and make its wiser voice heard over the white noise of fear and revenge, theatre is no longer a mere cultural delicacy. It has become essential.

Taken from the book Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali by Andy Morgan (Freemuse Publications)

(c) Andy Morgan / Freemuse Publications 2013

Just a piece of paper. Just a little wrap. Just an old statue. Just a mud hut.

The tomb of Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar Mohammed Ben Aqit, which used to stand to the north of Timbuktu in the cemetery that also bears his name, was certainly no architectural marvel. It was a simple one roomed adobe hut, with old wooden roof joists, semi-ornate doors and windows and a rendering of more modern breezeblocks to protect it from the annual rains. During the saint’s lifetime, this modest structure had been part of his home. Around him in the Sidi Mahmoud cemetery lay the tombs of another 167 of Timbuktu’s 333 saints.

When mujahedeen claiming to belong to the Touareg militia Ansar ud-Dine, but more likely to be affiliated directly to Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, came to vandalise the tomb on Friday May 4th 2012, there was little danger of the world losing a grand piece of architectural heritage. This wasn’t the Taj Mahal or the mausoleum of Tamerlane in Samarkand. But something was most definitely lost, something more powerful to local people than art. It was the peace and repose of a friend, a protector; it was a sense of respect and reverence that made life stable and liveable; it was a place to contemplate, to give thanks, to utter supplications for comfort or good fortune; it was a piece of history of immense worth not only to Timbuktu, but to the whole of Africa and the Muslim world.

It was this symbolic value that the Ansar ud-Dine militiamen objected to. “What you’re doing is sinful! Ask God directly, rather than a dead man,” they shouted at the mute crowd who had been carrying out their observances at Sidi Mahmoud’s tomb that Friday of prayer. An angry cluster of bystanders gathered to watch as the mujahedeen, led by a Mauritanian man who had just arrived in Timbuktu for the purpose, smashed the door to the mausoleum and ripped down the thin white veils covering the tomb of the saint. Those veils, left by supplicants in the hope that their prayers would be granted, were then burned in full view of the onlookers. One of them tried to protest, but he was bound, gagged and bundled into the boot of a car. It wasn’t the first such act of religious iconoclasm in modern Malian history, but it was the first to make a victim of the memory of a saint as great as Sidi Mahmoud and it provoked local grief and international outrage.

In important ways, the scenes of vandalism and destruction that were played out in Timbuktu following the Salafist takeover in April 2012 weren’t new at all. There was something very old about them. Mostly white Arabic or Hassaniya speaking men from the northern deserts were ‘teaching’ the blacks how to worship Allah in the ‘proper’ manner. Granted, some of the mujahedeen might have been black Africans from the Nigerian Islamist terror group Boko Haram or soldiers of fortune from southern Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Guinea. But the ringleaders and spokespersons were mainly Arab northerners; either local Berabiche from the Timbuktu region, Sahrawis from northern Mauritania and Western Sahara or Algerians from the Touat and Tidikelt. Some of them were Touareg. Just as the Ikhwan of Saudi Arabia unleashed their righteous ire on the people of the Hijaz, the AQIM overlords of Timbuktu were imposing an alien religious philosophy by force of arms on local people with a very different cultural outlook to theirs and, in this case, a different skin colour too. It was a scenario that had been replayed for centuries along the cultural ‘fault’ line that stretches from Mauritania in the west to the Sudan in the east, separating the ‘white’ Arab and Berber people of the north from the ‘black’ African peoples of the south.

Unsurprisingly, black Malian religious leaders were averse to the idea of being re-educated about Islam whilst men from the north pointed a gun at their heads. Something that characterised many of the local responses to the Salafist occupation of Timbuktu and other parts of northern Mali was the defiant claim that Mali had no need of any lessons from strangers on how to be good Muslims. Mali is proud of its own religious traditions, however innovative and sinful they may seem to the followers of Abd al-Wahab.

After the Islamist takeover there was a constant war of words between the leaders of AQIM, MUJAO and Ansar ud-Dine and the religious hierarchy in the larger northern towns. Points of religious law were debated with the imams of the great mosques, often on absurdly abstruse grounds of contention. A fine example occurred when the Islamist occupiers entered the Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu to try and prevent the Grand Imam from using a microphone and loud speakers during prayers. For the Salafis, the use of such a modern technology was anathema simply because it didn’t exist in the time of The Prophet. The imam of Djinguereber turned the argument on its head and asked the assailants to produce the verse from the Quran that specifically forbids the use of microphones and speakers during prayers. The Islamists had no answer and grudgingly left.

“Everything they do is contrary to the principles of Islam,” was the sweeping rebuff expressed by Alphadi Wangara, the imam of Sidi Yahya mosque in Timbuktu, in an interview for the Malian newspaper 22 Septembre. “That’s been obvious from day one. At the first meeting they held with all the imams of the city, they wanted us to believe that they had to come to move Islam forward in Timbuktu. We’ve subsequently learned what their word is worth… We met them and made it clear that we know the principles of Islam. The Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon his name, explained the word of God to men using his wisdom. We pointed out to them that the very fact they’re trampling our soil, forcing their way into places of worship and roaming around town with their weapons in their hands is forbidden under Islam. All good Muslims know that in order to impose shari’a law, one must be righteous oneself. Whereas these Islamists are far from being righteous men.” The fact is however, that imam Wangara gave this interview in Bamako. In order to speak his mind without fear, he had been forced to leave his home and go into exile. The pride and defiance of Mali’s traditional religious leaders meant little in the face of whips and AK47s.

Taken from the book Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali by Andy Morgan (Freemuse Publications)

(c) Andy Morgan / Freemuse Publications 2013

Manny Ansar was Tinariwen’s manager at the time. He remembers a whole group of Touareg musicians, ex-rebel leaders and ishumar who spent time together, in each other’s houses, out in the bush or, if they were in Bamako, out along the banks of the Niger, where it was quiet and the nature and solitude reminded them of home. ‘Ishumar’ is a Tamashek adaptation of the French word ‘chomeur’ – the collective noun for the young Touareg men who left their homes in Mali and Niger in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to drought and lack of opportunity to find work in Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso and beyond. It was these men who became the foot soldiers of the rebellions of 1990.

Life in the early 1990s was convivial. There was music. Women felt free to come and go. Some people smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol. The bonds between those young Touareg, their music and their culture seemed strong and unbreakable.

No one quite knows why some senior Touareg figures from the northeast, including Iyad Ag Ghali, began to succumb to the message of Pakistani preachers belonging to Tablighi Jama’at. Perhaps it was due to a general disillusion with the nationalist cause, fuelled by the bitter in fighting and recrimination between different Tamashek tribes and clans that followed the Tamanrasset Accords of 1991 and the National Pact of 1994. Perhaps they were sick of petty politics and yearned for something loftier, purer, and more holy. Perhaps the very notion of dividing up Muslims into nation states seemed suddenly ungodly. The Wahabi have always preached that national boundaries are a Western imposition, designed to divide and weaken the Islamic umma, which should by rights exist in one borderless and divinely ruled polity.

“The Pakistani Salafists came through Bamako,” Manny remembers. “People saw them with their beards and their white robes. They were nice people. Then they went up to Kidal and that’s where certain Touareg leaders came into contact with them.” It is hard to establish the precise date when all this happened, perhaps sometime in 1995 or just afterwards.

Manny remembers that everything happened very slowly and gradually. “There was a kind of psychological preparation, done in a really friendly way,” he says. “Then certain friends started to distance themselves bit by bit from our circle, people who had liked partying and beautiful women. They were still friends and we would still meet and talk about the situation of the country and the Touareg, but one felt that they were drifting away. They started to disapprove of my lifestyle, the travelling, my friendships with Westerners, the festivals, musicians, alcohol, the life of pleasure. They still had respect, esteem, even friendship towards me but my lifestyle didn’t suit them any more. They left very gently.”

When they came back from their trips to Pakistan and Mecca, the dedication of these daw’ah devotees deepened. “They were really like monks,” Manny remembers, “dressed in white, very simple, eating the minimum, praying all the time, unconcerned about life’s problems except spreading messages of peace, togetherness and, of course, God. The first thing that shocked us is that they asked their wives not to shake hands with men any more. Suddenly you would stop seeing their women at all. They would stay in another room where they entertained their women friends.”

Meanwhile, Manny had helped to launch the Festival in the Desert in January 2001 at Tin Essako, a tiny little village to the east of Kidal. The festival was born thanks to an immense team effort involving Manny and his EFES association, Tinariwen, the French group Lo’Jo and various other French and Malian funders and supporters. The only threat felt during that first edition was that of petty criminality and banditry. The year before some Dutch tourists had been attacked and murdered up near Tessalit, north of Kidal. On the way up to the festival itself, the truck transporting a small PA system that had been flown in from France was stopped by armed bandits. It took the verbal skill and courage of Kheddou Ag Ossade, one of the core members of Tinariwen who later went on to form the group Terakaft, to dissuade the muggers from taking the equipment and ruining the festival.

A smaller event took place a year later in Tessalit, but it was the third Festival in the Desert in January 2003, and the first in the silky white dunes of Essakane which were to become the festival’s permanent home, that really established the event’s worldwide reputation. The number of visitors, both local and international, had tripled or even quadrupled. Well- known names like Robert Plant were present. The stage looked like a proper stage. The sound was of the same professional standard as a festival in Europe. The festival had ‘arrived’.

And still no sign of any Islamists. A month after that 2003 edition of the festival, the GSPC kidnapped 32 European hostages in the Tassili region of southern Algeria, between Illizi and Djanet. It was the first major crisis involving the kidnapping of Western tourists that the Sahara had ever known. Fifteen of the hostages were sent down into Mali, where they were held prisoner while the chief of the GSPC cell, Amari Saïfi aka Abderrazak El Para, negotiated a ransom with the Malian, Swiss and German governments. A team of northern ‘notables’, including Iyad Ag Ghali and Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, were sent to speak to El Para and his men. Links were forged and promises were made then that led eventually through many a twist and turn to the Islamist takeover of 2012.

Taken from the book Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali by Andy Morgan (Freemuse Publications)

(c) Andy Morgan / Freemuse Publications 2013

In Kidal, a group of women gathered on the dirt airstrip to the east of the town. They sat close, at least thirty of them, in a large huddle of shimmering indigo robes. One woman started to beat the tindé drum, while another sprinkled water on its goatskin to keep it taut and resonant. Their chanting ululating rose up to the hazy skies and sent old poetry out to the flat horizons; calling, responding, propelling, forward, me, you, us, all, together. The tindé is the mitochondrial DNA of all Touareg music. Its horizontal trance-beat powers the communal joy of major feasts and gatherings in Touareg lands. Like so much traditional Touareg music, it is played by women and only women. The tindé is an essential ingredient in the glue that binds female society together and gives it power and confidence. But as the men gathered around to watch, as they had been used to doing for as long as they could remember, Ansar ud-Dine militiamen with black headbands and AK47s strapped to their chests sliced into the crowd and shattered it into angry fragments, shouting at the men to keep away from the women and go home. Then they ordered the women to stop what they’re doing and go back to their homes as well. The mood burst, and the joy leaked away to be replaced by surliness and frustration.

On the outskirts of Gao, a local takamba musician was stopped at a checkpoint on one of the major roads out of town. Takamba is the sound of Gao. With its loping rhythms, sensual dance, skyward vocals and raw cranked-up teherdents (lute) and guitars, it has long been the preferred style of musical entertainment at weddings, baptisms and Tabeski feasts in the town and the surrounding country. It is a style that also unifies the Touareg and Songhai people, often at odds with each other, as it is performed and enjoyed by people from both ethnic groups. Gao without takamba would be like Rio without samba; hard to imagine.

Our musician was on his way to a wedding in a village outside Gao, his car laden with instruments and equipment. At the checkpoint he was ordered to step down from his car by a MUJAO militiaman who then proceeded to search it. All the instruments are taken out and piled up by the side of the road; guitars, teherdent, amps, speakers, calabashes. The pile was doused in petrol and set alight. The musician was too scared to shout out, or cry, or flee. There were guns everywhere. He just stood and watched as his livelihood went up in flames. If he made a scene or showed any emotion, he knew that his own life would be in danger.

All these incidents were reported to me either by the people involved or by third parties living in Mali. I have deliberately not used anyone’s real name to protect the subjects and their families.

In Timbuktu a posse of local Islamist militiamen turned up at a radio station and took out four large hessian rice bags. They proceeded to fill them up with music cassettes, hundreds and hundreds of them, an entire archive of local musical culture, painstakingly collected over a decade or more. The station manager stood by, distraught, knowing that all this music, that has been a gift to the world and an ember of pride in local hearts, will be lost forever.

In Gao a family watched a programme called ‘Mini Star’ on television. It is a Malian adaptation of the X-factor idea, in which young up-and-coming singers and musicians imitate the greats of Malian music; Salif Keïta, Ali Farka Touré, Mangala Camara, Sekouba Bambino and others. The performances are judged by a panel and each week a group is eliminated by popular vote. TV is an important means for broadcasting new music in Mali. TV is the family’s window onto the world. The weather was hot in Gao and all the windows of the family home were open. A patrol of Islamic policemen heard the sound of music coming from the TV as they passed by the house. They doubled back and entered the premises, grabbing the TV and smashing it out on cracked paving stones of the yard with the butts of their rifles. The family were warned that next time they would get the whip.