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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Les Jeunes Nomades at the Taragalte Festival 2016 © Andy Morgan

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a boundless dream for a boundless place.

Andy Morgan,

Bristol, March 2017.

© Andy Morgan. All rights reserved.

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

The post TARAGALTE FESTIVAL – Dreaming of a better Sahara appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Mbongwana Star (L-R): Doctor L, Randy, Coco (back seated), R9, Theo (seated), Sage.
(c) Florent de la Tullaye

“Here, in the streets, it’s the anti-technology thing that works. Everything’s recorded in the red! Sometimes I over-boost mikes that are recording nothing, just to pick up the kind of environment that’s around me now. Can you hear it? There are three TVs going full blast. Distortion multiplies the energy. I love it!”

Doctor L’s grin pixellates as an atrocious Internet connection dices up our Skype conversation. It doesn’t stop him. He seems to revel in the unpredictable zaniness that kicks in when technology breaks down. His words keep coming, delivered with an accent traceable to some obscure point between Paris and Dublin, his lean face a flag of fearless cheek under the ragged mound of dreadlocks that he credits with the ability to disarm any feelings of hostility a lone white man might otherwise attract in the ghettos of Africa.

It’s not just the sonic dirt that excites him; it’s the free spirit you sometimes find in places that no one is paying any attention to: the garage lands where garage bands turn streetwise anger into DIY productivity, revelling in their own ostracism and self-reliance. Punk rock, in other words. But Doctor L isn’t talking to me from underneath London’s Westway or on New York’s Lower East Side; he’s talking to me from Avenue Kasavubu in downtown Kinshasa, just opposite the Academie des Beaux-Arts. He seems to have found the eternal punk ethic alive and well on the banks of the Congo river, in the raucous swelter-skelter of Africa’s third largest city (equal to London in size), and he’s working hard to bottle it and bring it back to Europe. “It’s not that going to Africa is any big deal,” he says. “The big deal is to try and get something out.”

Horror stories about the Congo have been feeding the gorier side of the European imagination since the British Consul Roger Casement published his report on the abuses of the Congo Free State in 1904. The rape of that immense land, witnessed amongst others by Casement and his friend Joseph Conrad, whose classic Heart of Darkness remains one of the most controversial literary statements about Africa ever written by a white man, has continued to this day under both European and African rulers. It has been perennially justified by the global need, or rather greed, for certain raw materials deemed fundamental to modern existence, rubber initially and then a cornucopia of minerals including copper, gold, diamonds and, latterly, the rare-earth metals that make our digital ‘smart’ lives possible. The Congo wars of the 1990s and 2000s currently sit at No. 15 in the Wikipedia chart of the most costly conflicts in history in terms of human life, and No. 1 in African history. And yet who, outside Central Africa, remembers them now. Rape, followed by injury, insult, ignorance and forgetfulness: is there any other part of our earth that has been so abused and misunderstood?

But the place has its fans. Among them are the Belgian music producer-manager Michel Winter and the French filmmakers Florent de la Tullaye and Renaud Barret. Toiling away down in showbiz’s steerage class to bring some of Kinshasa’s street-level wonders to the attention of the world, they belong to a rare breed. The nightmarish penumbra that envelopes the Congo in the Western imagination tends to repel all but the hardiest souls. It takes a special kind of cultural adventurer to lift the curse and see Kinshasa for what it surely is: a place of immense human creativity, ingenuity and style, with the potential to become one of Africa’s creative powerhouses. It seems that Doctor L has just joined their ranks. “The city becomes a drug,” he says. “Freaks like Michel, like Renaud, like Florent are important. I give the crown to all those guys.”

Yakala ‘Coco’ Ngambali. (c) Renaud Barret

Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye first travelled to Kinshasa in 2004, two virtually penniless wannabe film-makers enticed by an invisible force: ‘invisible’ as in hidden from the rest of the world and ‘force’ as in the tenacious will to survive and create. “At that stage of my life, France was just screwing my head,” Barret remembers. “All those people crying into their cups because they had to have the support of the state just to create something. In Kinshasa, it was the complete opposite; it was people who create out of a sense of urgency, who create because it keeps them alive. I said to myself: “That’s it! That’s the truth, not in the calculation but in the act of creation first and foremost.”

Barret and de la Tullaye’s first documentary film Jupiter’s Dance was a portrait of the Kinshasa music scene through the prism of a musician and street-level philosopher by the name of Jupiter Bokondji. While they were making that film they stumbled across a bunch of musicians in wheelchairs serenading the denizens of the Kinshasa night: prostitutes, renegade soldiers, hustlers and street kids or shégués as they’re known locally, apparently in mysterious homage to Che Guevara. The band was named Staff Benda Bilili (“the people who see beyond”) after a local beer joint. Barret and de la Tullaye spent the next five years and every ounce of energy and courage they possessed making a film about Staff and the extraordinary underworld they inhabited. It was called Benda Bilili and when it came out in 2010, it became the most successful non-Western music documentary since Buena Vista Social Club, helping to propel the reputations of both band and filmmakers to unimagined levels.

But Staff Benda Bilili’s success didn’t bring a deluge of music and film producers to Kinshasa. The ‘freaks’ carried on ploughing their solitary field; the curse remained in place. One reason perhaps is that both Benda Bilili and the other well-publicised Congolese tale of musical triumph against adversity – the undoubtedly remarkable story of the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste which was turned into the film Kinshasa Symphony by Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer – drew their power, for Western audiences at least, not from the originality of their art, but from their shared themes of gargantuan self-improvement and self-empowerment through music. They seemed to satisfy Matthew Arnold’s conviction, so entrenched in the Western humanist mindset, that art can elevate the lowest into the realms of ‘sweetness and light’, the only limiting factors being work, will-power and self-belief. Inevitably, there also was a complex element of pity involved.

And though none would dare admit it, both Staff Benda Bilili and Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste had something of Samuel Johnson’s proverbial dog walking on his two hind legs about them: “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.” The allusion is unkind of course, and largely inaccurate, as was Johnson’s original statement, which he made in reference to female preachers. Speaking in purely musical terms, Staff Benda Bilili added a credible new chapter to the very old story of Congolese rumba, a style that, along with its louder, brasher offspring soukous and ndombolo, has been the dominant musical force in the Congo and larges swathes of sub-Saharan Africa since the 1960s. Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste might not yet have achieved the technical brilliance of the London Symphony Orchestra or the Berlin Philharmonic – who could possibly expect them to have done so – but their renditions of Carmina Burana and Beethoven’s Ninth exude a courage and cohesive pride that can ignite powerful joy in those with an open heart and sympathetic ear.

But self-improvement and the triumph of human will over poverty and disability can only inspire and sustain the career of an artist or musician for a limited time. The journey from rags to riches can only be taken once. The world must eventually judge an artist not by the journey he or she has taken, but by the intrinsic qualities of their art, not only the skill but, more importantly, the creativity and originality.

When Staff Benda Bilili split under the weight of their own success in late 2013, their main songwriter ‘Coco’ Yakala Ngambali teamed up with fellow singer ‘Theo’ Nsituvuidi Nzonza to form a new band. At first it was called Trio Mbongwana, then Staff Mbongwana International and finally Mbongwana Star. Mbongwana simply means ‘change’ or ’switch’ in Lingala, the lingua franca of the Congo River. “In Mbongwana Star, we’ve changed all the rules,” Theo says in one of the band’s early promotional videos. “We’ve decided to take control. We choose to produce our music ourselves. We are all bosses now.” Theo went further went I interviewed the band in London recently: “We also changed the rhythm,” he said. “We built a tempo that can wake up any dancefloor on the planet.” Talking to the Theo and the rest of the band, it quickly became clear to me that what the band refer to as ‘rhythm’ actually means something broader, something closer to ‘style’.

Nsituvuidi ‘Theo’ Nzonza.
(c) Florent de la Tullaye

Following the global success and painful breakup of Staff Benda Bilili, whatever style Mbongwana Star chose to play had to be new and surprising. It couldn’t just be a re-run of Staff Benda Bilili minus the brilliance of the young Roger Landu and his self-made satongé (one-stringed tin-can harp), both of whom added such a unique dimension to Staff Benda’s sound. Nor did Theo and Coco want to perpetuate the Dickensian sentiments invoked by their rags-to-riches story and the fact that they’re both handicapped. That was old news. They wanted their music to stand by itself, crutchless and proud, and for it to do that, they needed to find a sound that was startling and irresistible, one that mirrored the creative genius of their home city.

But that mission was still vague and unfocussed. Both musicians were carrying a heavy load of influences and habits accumulated during long lives hard-lived (“All the lives of ghetto people are like odysseys,” says Renaud Barret). That made the task of reinventing themselves harder. Coco was turning sixty, and Theo had left his fiftieth birthday way behind. The Congolese rhumba artists who had nurtured them as children and young men still dominated their creative outlook. It wasn’t easy to imagine a new style that paid respect to those greats whilst breaking the mould they had bequeathed.

The Congolese rumba that was born in the 1940s, a love child of the country’s obsession with imported Cuban dance music mixed and its immense wealth of native dances and rhythms, has become a religion in the Congo. Its ‘gods’ – Franco, Tabu Ley le Rochereau, Le Grand Kallé, Zaiko Langa Langa, Papa Wemba – are cultural icons that inspire pride and loyalty. Their legacy cannot not be toyed with lightly, or irreverently. “Sounds can change, according to what we’re living over there, to what we come across in the streets and elsewhere,” Theo says. “But it’ll never change completely, because we’re still in the rhythm of our forebears: the rumba rhythm. Those are the roots of Congolese music. They’ll never disappear.”

Coco and Theo both contracted polio in childhood, but in contrast to the cruel ostracism suffered by many a Congolese child similarly afflicted, both were treated well by their parents. Coco only left home at the age of 14 when he realised his presence was becoming a burden to his family. He preferred to live with his friends in a special shelter for the handicapped where there was a possibility of learning a trade (tailoring for women in his case). Theo’s father, a fisherman, went to see all the traditional healers in his locality to find a cure for his son, without success. Despite this, Theo was sent to school at the age of six and stayed there until he was fifteen. Then, on the advice of his parents, he travelled up to Kinshasa to live with his older sister and learn a trade, which also happened to be tailoring.

At the time, Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of what was then called Zaire, took a paternal interest in the plight of the disabled and passed laws to ensure that they were, for the most part, properly fed, housed and taught some employable skills. Mobutu also exempted them from charges and duties levied on the river ferries that chugged back and forth over the Congo River between Kinshasa, capital of what had been the Belgian Congo, and Brazzaville, capital of what had been the French Congo. Mobutu’s stroke of largesse attracted many handicapped people to the Kinshasa river port, where, several times a week, their self-made hand-cranked wheel chairs would be loaded up with trade goods and heaved up the gangways onto the ferries for the tax-free journey across the river.

Kinshasa was already a huge city back in the 70s and 80s, and because many of these handicapped traders lived in shelters that were hours away from the river-port, they often decided to move closer and sleep outdoors on large flattened cardboards boxes or tonkara in the local argot (derived from the French slang vocabulary known as verlan, which ‘flips’ the syllables of two-syllable words, turning carton or ‘cardboard box’ into toncar). Despite their street-level existence, the handicapped often managed to achieve a level of security and financial stability that was denied to millions of their fellow Congolese, thanks to the perks afforded them by the law and the strength they found in numbers.

(L-R) Sage, Doctor L, Randy (c) Renaud Barret

Coco’s father went down to the port to try and persuade him to return home, but he refused. His new life down by the river suited him well. His uncle, who was a musician, bought Coco a guitar and he started to entertain his fellow street-dwellers with the popular rhumba hits of the day. He would jam and hangout with another handicapped river-trader by the name of Nzalé, who was an excellent guitarist. Coco was about eighteen years old when the pair began to busk in the swanky bars and restaurants frequented by whites in Gombé, the downtown ‘entertainment’ district of Kinshasa. Years went by in this way: trading, busking, hawking, surviving.

Theo and Coco started playing together after they met down at the river-port in 1999. Theo had learned the traditional music of Bas-Congo from his father and later become the singer in a band in Brazzaville. In 2002, Coco, Theo and their fellow riverside troubadours came to the attention of one of the Congo’s most renowned international stars: Papa Wemba. Enchanted by their rough-cut melodies and fearlessness, Wemba offered them free use of his downtown rehearsal studio, but his patronage ceased after barely more than a year when Wemba was indicted by a court in France for visa-fraud and people smuggling. Not long after this setback, in late 2003, Coco joined up with Nzalé and Papa Ricky, another handicapped musician and doyen of downtown street life, to form Staff Benda Bilili. Theo joined soon afterwards.

“Something you find a lot with people [in Kinshasa], be they musicians or boxers, is that dreams are a way of surviving,” says Florent de la Tullaye. “Dreams allow people to walk tall and create projects. Even if they come to nothing in the end, just the energy of those dreams increases the chances of survival.” Perhaps that’s one of the reasons Coco and Theo lost so little time after Staff Benda Bilili imploded nine years later, before launching themselves on another adventure. When one dream dies, give birth to another one…quick style!

The first Mbongwana Star rehearsals were fairly chaotic. “They bought along this guy and that guy,” remembers manager and exec producer Michel Winter, “mates, members of the family and I don’t know what. And we quickly ended up with a kind of church choir, at least in terms of the voices. It was more like demo stuff than music by a band that was ready to release an album.” According to Renaud Barret, it was Theo who was most aware that what they were doing lacked originality. Barret told him about a friend called Liam Farrell aka Doctor L. Liam and Renaud got to know each other in St Ouen, the scruffy suburb north of Paris city centre where they both lived.

Liam Farrell ‘Doctor L’. (c) Renaud Barret

Liam is the son of the Irish artist Michael Farrell, who exiled himself to Paris when Liam was still a child. He grew into a maverick young drummer and producer on the Parisian hip-hop and electro scenes before becoming one of the most innovative (you might even say ‘disruptive’) producers of music from Africa. Liam had been collaborating with Kabeya Tshimpangila aka Cubain, a percussionist from Kinshasa who seems to have played with everyone who’s anyone in the city’s grass roots music scene, including Jupiter and Staff Benda Bilili. Cubain also happened to be in Kinshasa helping Coco and Theo set up Mbongwana Star. The connections were multiple.

Renaud Barret played Coco and Theo some songs from Black Voices, the album that Liam had made with the Nigerian drummer Tony Allen back in 2004. The name Tony Allen was already enough to put some heat into the idea of a collaboration. Coco and Theo were fans of Afrobeat, the rhythm that Allen had invented with Fela Kuti back in the late 1960s; Black Voices had put new life into that rhythm, just as it was emerging from the confines of African and ‘World’ music fandom and attracting an entirely new audience of white funksters and hip electro-dance priests. “That’s it!” was Theo’s reaction on hearing the album, “that’s the direction we should go in. Because mbongwana means ‘change’. Because that’s the future.”

Liam ‘Doctor L’ Farrell and Michel Winter travelled to Kinshasa in early summer of 2014 for the first real recording sessions. Michel had rented a small house in its own yard near the city centre, a parcelle in local parlance, which offered the most basic accommodation. Doctor L slept in a tiny badly ventilated room that baked in the tropical heat, day and night. The grid provided electricity only for short periods, if at all, so a generator had to be hired to run the amps, mikes and recording equipment. Coco’s wife would arrive everyday with the food – sometimes chicken, sometimes fish accompanied by fufu, rice, manioc, beans. It was the kind of set up that Doctor L thrives in.

The music that Coco and Theo played to Michel and Doctor L was a heedless assault of percussion, guitars and voices that was unsure of what direction it should be heading in. There was work to be done. The sound that everyone was searching for was still latent, like a beautiful stone sculpture embedded in a rough-hewn boulder. Doctor L began to record as much as he could, chipping away, paring down, honing. “When we started, we were still doing the same ideas as before,” Theo says, “but when Liam got involved he proposed a lot of changes.”

R9 & Doctor Farrell. (c) Renaud Barret

“We were looking for something fairly rock’n’roll,” says Winter, whose CV also includes the management of Staff Benda Bilili and the dukes of Congolese distortion – Konono No.1. “We wanted to try and get out of the 100% African, afro-African, straightjacket, into which everybody tries to stick African bands and get back, not in the music necessarily but in spirit, to the 1970s when Africans were really modern, maybe more so than us. I found that Coco already had that in him. People here are a lot more creative than we can imagine; Kinshasa is crawling with creativity. You couldn’t care less if it’s African or not! We just thought ‘Let’s just go for it! Because it’s there anyway. You can feel it in the streets. It exists!’”

“First off, it wasn’t easy,” Theo admits, “but afterward we adapted to the rhythm very well. We changed very quickly…changed rhythm, changed everything. We called it ‘rhumba rock’, because we sing in Lingala, but the rhythm is rock.”

After a few weeks, Doctor L went back to Paris and worked on the material in his studio. He spent the rest of the summer working on it. It was an alchemical process, taking raw sketches of sound, stitching them together and transmuting them into something that shone bright and grabbed the ear. The direction was as evident to him in Paris as it had been back in Kinshasa. There was something out there, a street-level Kinshasa aesthetic that had be captured and distilled into musical form. It wasn’t the old rumba or soukous, whose heyday was in the 1970s and 1980s, or anything traditional or folkloric. Traces of all those elements were present, but the spirit itself moved beyond all of them. “Coco and Theo, they’re not talking about their village anymore,” says Doctor L. “That can be generations away from them, and they get bored of this kind of caricature. What they have [in Kinshasa] is a certain ‘Yoruban’ way of life.”

Doctor L’s use of the word ‘Yoruban’ is strange. It’s not meant in the strictly ethnic sense of course; Kinshasa is “a cauldron of all the 400 ethnicities of the Congo” according to Renaud Barret, with the Kongo, Luba and Anamongo in pole position and Yoruba holding only a minority presence if at all. To Farrell, ‘Yoruban’ seems to have more of a spiritual meaning related to the dynamic and polyglot freedom of an immense urban space: “Kinshasa reminds me of the New York of the 1980s. In fact, Kinshasa is more New York than New York itself! It’s Yoruban, and from a Yoruban place you can have a gay band, new wave, punk rock, what the fuck! It’s not griotic, with heritage from your father or your grandfather. It’s more like the European way, like garage music, like when you get ‘Louie Louie’ African style, or James Brown from Ghana, or the like the late 60s and 70s in Lagos, when it was rock’n’roll man!”

Keyboard Percussionist, Kinshasa. (c) Renaud Barret

Technology, the Internet, have changed the game in Kinshasa, like as they have everywhere else. The gamut of influences has exploded. “Cable TV is only four or five years old in West Africa,” Farrell continues, “and already, in four or five years, it’s totally changed the kids. They won’t listen to rumba any more, they’ll be listening to Beyoncé. They already know so much more about London and Paris than we’ll ever know about Kinshasa, and that changes what the expectations of people are from music. But it’s good. I mean, fuck it, the world is like that. Everything needs to be communicating; it’s difference of style, of vibe that makes your originality.”

For Doctor L, this opening up of the arteries of communication and influence isn’t just inevitable, it’s positive. Roots may be important, but they can’t entangle an artist in modes of expression that limit his vision or prevent him being an honest mirror to the life going on around him. “I think Africa deserves, like everybody, to have artists who can take different trips, which may or may not be 100% related to Africa,” he says. “It’s not like we’re busy saying ‘We’re European!’ What does that fucking mean? It’s important that all this magic of art can exist there as well, without it being Iike me saying ‘Ok, I’m going to Ireland to do Celtic music because that’s who I’m supposed to be.’ We’re not talking about Africa here, we’re talking about guys who are doing music.”

When Doctor L’s mixes were heard back in Kinshasa, the effect was one of puzzlement, stupefaction even, followed by escalating excitement and wild dancing. “It was a bit different compared to our rhythm here in Kinshasa,” Theo remembers. “Really, really different. We loved it from the beginning.” Really? From the beginning? “Immediately! It was…WHAAAA?…oh yes, this is good! Those were rhythms that we could get close to.”

What about guitarist R9, one of the ‘youth wing’ of the band? How did he react when he heard the mixes? “Well, it was brand new music,” he said, “but it wasn’t complicated, because it was based on music that we’ve already been hearing for a long time. It was a just a modification for us. For me, it was a joy; I was happy to have created a new style with that. The youth of Kinshasa are more interested by new things. It’s really very important.”

Barret, who was with the band in Kinshasa when Liam’s mixes came through, remembers them dancing all over the place. The songs were on constant replay. Crucially perhaps, the reaction of the band’s entourage was also very encouraging. Fans would gather whenever the band rehearsed in their studio in the Ndjili district. “They would throw flowers at us, support us, shout ‘Mbongwana Star Forward!” remembers Sage, the band’s percussionist and vibe master. “We never expected that. They [the mixes] were great. And they made everyone dance. Without even singing the style, people were already dancing.”

For Theo, danceability is the ultimate litmus test of any new musical venture: “Whether it’s in Kinshasa, or here [in Europe]: that’s the most important things for me. We’ve done quite a few concerts and everybody dances; everyone is into that rhythm.”

Thanks to a fortuitous meeting at a soirée in London dedicated to music from the Sahara Desert, Michel Winter pressed a copy of the mixes into the hands of Nick Gold, famed founder and A&R man of World Circuit. Love at first sight in rare in showbiz, and the offer of a contract on the basis of a simple demo even rarer. But those Congo River gods must have been working overtime because Gold listened to the mixes on his way home that night and a deal was on the table within weeks. Not only was Mbongwana Star the first new band that World Circuit had signed in a long while, it was also the first in over twenty years to be produced by someone other than Gold himself and the first ever to have come from the Congo (Mali and Cuba being World Circuit’s habitual hunting grounds).

By the time Liam and Michel returned to Kinshasa in November, Coco, Theo and their new musicians were busy making the new sound their own. “What’s really interesting with Coco and Theo is that they’re ready to run with it if they feel it, whatever it is,” Liam says. “It’s not me inventing them. They’re artists. This is something really interesting that I love in Africa, and that people don’t talk about a lot: the strength and rapidity they have to integrate whatever comes up.”

Doctor L and Randy. (c) Renaud Barret

The band line-up was beginning to reduce and solidify. First on percussion, then drums, was a handsome young ghetto dude with an intense gaze, a neat splay of short dreads and an easy respectful manner. Forty years younger than Coco, Randy Makana Kalambayi was born in Kinshasa to a family who survived by hawking and doing odd jobs. When he was still a child, his father decided to move the family to Bas Congo but died shortly afterwards. Randy went back to Kinshasa to live with his mother’s family; it was hard to make ends meet. At the age of seven, he met Coco, who was the neighbour of one of his uncles. Coco set him up with a family in Brazzaville; the mother sold peanuts down in the market and Randy contributed by selling plastic bags on the streets. Water had to be fetched from a standpipe hundreds of metres from the house. Life was an accumulation of all these little rites of survival.

Randy played percussion in a local church in Brazzaville before deciding, aged only eight but not quite tender anymore, to go back to Kinshasa and reunite with Coco. He became his mentor’s chief wheel-chair pusher, a position that earned him Coco’s protection, as well as some standing in the informal street syndicate of the homeless and handicapped. In the brutally Darwinian world of Kinshasa’s streets, such an alliance could mean the difference between survival and obliteration for a young shégué or street kid.

Randy even joined Staff Benda Bilili for a while and contributed percussion to their first album Très Très Fort. But before he could board the sweet chariot that carried the band off to Europe and success, Randy was persuaded to come back to Brazzaville by his mother to help support the family. He worked as a fare-collector on the busses and a labourer on a building site, a job that turned out to be lethally hard and very badly paid. Eventually he crossed the river once again and landed back in Kinshasa. There Randy learned that Staff Benda Bilili had become a worldwide success and were currently on tour in Japan. When they returned they asked Randy to rejoin the band, but visa problems prevented him from going on Staff Benda’s next tour. He did play some percussion to the band’s second album however. Then, when Coco and Théo decided to quit and set up Mbongwana Star, they invited him along as drummer.

Although Randy is a father now, he still lives in a shelter for the homeless and handicapped, a place that functions, according to Farrell, like an African village lost in the middle of a megapolis. He’s become a master of the Kitéké rhythms of the Batéké plateau, the old name for the country surrounding the ‘pool’ between Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Those rhythms, subtle and strangely familiar, are the pistons of the new Mbongwana sound.

For the pivotal role of guitar-player, an instrument that has supplied the melodic pulse of Congolese music since the 1950s, Coco and Théo chose Jean-Claude Kamina Mulodi, aka ‘R9’ because he was the ninth and last child born to his parents. R9 is a thirty-something guitar hero, who long ago pledged his allegiance to Zaiko Langa Langa, the Congolese band who dominated the pan-African soukous boom of the 1970s and 1980s. He’s also a huge fan of ACDC and Angus Young, but his stock-in-trade remains the intricately flowing, delicately sparkling Zaiko-esque guitar loops, the ones that send your soul skywards while your feet make love to the ground.

R9. (c) Renaud Barret

R9’s father, who was in the army, had a career in the Catholic priesthood mapped out for his son; but R9 had other ideas. He began making his own instruments out of junk when he was barely five years old, and was taught how to play by his elder brothers, who sang ndombolo. Having started off as a drummer, R9 gravitated towards the guitar and eventually became lead guitarist in a band in his hometown of Dibaya in Bandundu, a huge province that lies to the east of Kinshasa. R9’s parents had both died by the time he was seven, and his brothers sisters drifted away leaving him alone to survive on the sums of money sent him by his siblings. After graduating from the local lycée, R9 travelled up to Kinshasa and began performing with small neighbourhood groups, eventually working his way up to becoming a guitarist in the band of Pépé Kallé, a huge star in the Congo. When Coco and Théo formed Mbongwana they asked R9 to become their guitarist. “The guitar loops he plays made Liam and I think of techno and electro music from afar,” says Renaud Barret, “so he adapted well to that electro aspect of the project.”

Completing the line-up was Sage (as in the French word that rhymes with ‘massage’ and means ‘kind’, ‘good’ or ‘well-behaved’). Son of Coco’s wife Marie, Sage is a self-taught percussionist, a tropical cyclone on-stage, a ghetto rude-boy who enjoys his strolls on the wild side. “Very rock’n’roll” was Barret’s succinct description of Sage’s lifestyle.

In January 2015, just as Kinshasa was going through one of its periodic spasms of political violence and mayhem following President Laurent Kabila’s unconstitutional attempts to extend his time in office, Coco, Theo, Farrell and the other musicians were holed up in the Hotel Finesse on Avenue Kasavubu, patiently working out how to reproduce the challenging dynamics of Mbongwana’s revolutionary new style live on stage. Farrell’s position in the project had evolved from that of mere producer to producer, bassist, synth and sound FX player, arranger and conceptualiser. He was no longer the white European strategist who stays in his studio, one step removed, and envelopes his charges in a skin of sound that will, he hopes, make them palatable to the ears of the world. Mbongwana Star was no longer a purely African band. It was a trans-national, trans-ethnic, trans-cultural sound machine, a coalition of black and white, Africa and Europe. Don’t think James Brown; think Sly and the Family Stone.

Given the pressures of history and the build-up of sensitivity around topics such as race, culture and colonialism, it’s easy to guess at the prevalent line of questioning that Mbongwana star will be subjected to in the media and the cybersphere. Can a white man play such a prominent role in a black African band? Does it not risk smelling of appropriation, paternalism, cultural colonialism, exploitation, racial arrogance, dilution or all of the above (delete as applicable)?

Mbongwana Star (L-R): Coco, R9, Randy, Theo, Sage, Doctor L. (c) Florent de la Tullaye

Not only is Liam unapologetic about the level of his involvement in this project, he also considers the sensitivities and malaise that often surge to the fore in reaction to any cultural collaboration between white Europeans and black Africans to be misplaced, even reactionary: “I think, if you like music, and you like art, colour’s got fucking nothing to do with nothing. That’s what’s great about this world. We all need each other. Let’s stop pretending. I’m very happy that white guys make black guys exist and vice versa. It’s like all these old Analogue Africa records. You always need these white mad motherfuckers to dig out all the old dope African music…that’s what’s great about this world. And I’ve got African records where the mix is over the top man! The guitar is 20DBs too strong, but it’s fucking killing! It’s like magic. I never could have done that. So thank you guys!”

Why do I believe him? Several reasons. First the passion and sense of commitment that boosts the voltage of everything he says. Secondly, the time he’s sacrificed to this project, to sleeping in bedroom ovens, plugging into chugging generators, making videos on shoestring budgets, mixing, remixing and remixing the remixed remix, all in search of his grail: a sound that IS Kinshasa, right now in 2015. Thirdly, the feeling that Doctor L has moved beyond the naiveté that paints African musicians as angelic beings, imbued with a mystical spiritual power that a ‘fallen’ white man can only admire and serve. Like musicians everywhere, African musicians are humans who suffer from creative blocks, daft ideas, moments of madness, bad-judgement and breakdowns in reason. Should they be allowed to own their own music and determine their own creative path? Of course they should. The answer is so obvious that it makes the question superfluous. But they should also be able to search any place, consider any approach and collaborate with anyone they want to, white or black, European or African, to create something extraordinary.

Although there’s black blood in almost every note ever played by a white pop musician since the end of the First World War, the traffic has never been one way. Ragtime, jazz, blues, RnB, funk, soul, all have been fed by a minority of white as well as a majority of black cultural influences. In fact, the band with arguably the biggest influence on the evolution of black music in the last three decades, was white. And German! So, as Farrell suggests, let’s not pretend. The true creative impulse is colour-blind. It goes where it wants, talks to who it feels like talking to, collaborates with anybody that takes its fancy. As well as a mutual respect, it’s the brilliance, the originality at the end of the process that counts. “What’s interesting with Coco and Theo is that they’re ready to run if they feel it, whatever it is,” Farrell says. “We’re not like dictators. It’s not me inventing them. They’re artists.”

Coco repays the compliment: “Really, I like Liam. We work well with him. He’s courageous. He’s a real artist is Liam. I recognise that.” And when I ask the band if a white man can play African music, the response is heartfelt, and unanimous: “It’s not colour that plays music,” Theo says, “it’s the spirit. We don’t see the white, the black, the yellow, the red. We all have red in our veins. We’re together. We play music.”

Mbongwana’s aim is to express an attitude, a creative spirit that already exists in Kinshasa. It’s a spirit built on garbage. Renaud Barret has coined a cheeky moniker for it – System K – which he intends to use as the title of a forthcoming feature documentary. It refers not only to Kinshasa, but also to rue Kato, the downtown drag that has become the epicentre of the garbage-to-art revolution. It’s also a skit on the French term Système D, after the verbs se débrouiller (to get by, to find a way) and se démerder (to find a way without landing in the shit). Roughly, Système D means to manage and survive in the face of poverty and rejection with only your wits and your courage to protect you. The term combines English concepts such as the underclass, the black economy and the daily hustle of survival into one neat tag.

“System K runs the entire city,” Barret explains, “that’s to say, it’s imposed by the current climate, by la débrouille (making do), by all those gestures of daily life that are the creativity of survival. As you know Kinshasa was once the musical capital of Africa. Then everything crashed politically and so [there were] no new instruments or anything. De facto, a whole generation of young musicians with nothing in their hands and nothing in their pockets began making their own instruments, not to get into any kind of found-object art, but just out of necessity. Rue Kato is an artery, about two kilometres long from end to end, and on both sides of the streets you’ve these guys making stuff and creating stuff. They’re creating a new musical style. [They’re] recycled grooves but it makes me think of the first Wu Tang album, very minimalist stuff, all based on recycled materials. There are at least 10 creators there, who create loops with tape machines that are themselves reconstructed, and then people come and add stuff, whether it’s a female singer, a rapper, poets. Poverty has created this sound. That’s what’s fascinating. And It’s totally creative. If you listen closely, all the sounds of the city are in there.”

Boy with recycled instrument, Kinshasa (c) Renaud Barret

The rue Kato isn’t just producing musical instruments: Fashion, sculpture, video, photography, art, jewellery, automata, pedal power contraptions, motorised vehicles are all rising like the undead from the inexhaustible scrap heap. “Every instrument could be in a museum, with special lighting trained on it,” Barret says with a chuckle, “but it’s all happening in an atmosphere of general indifference, as always happens out there, a kind of enclosed world with no horizon.” In other words, it’s the old curse. Few people know about what’s happening in rue Kato, or the rest of Kinshasa, and few care. Barret hopes that his new film will shine a positive light on this subterranean world.

But the new spirit has to exist; there’s no choice: “That energy, that desire, that electricity, that vibe, it’s not just an invention,” Barret says. “It’s really coming through and it’s nourished by the fact that people are fed up with politics, with what’s happening at the summit of the state. It’s very new in fact. I’ve never seen that anger before, that punk aspect that’s swelling up.” When I ask Mbongwana Star about that spirit, Coco makes an uncharacteristic demand to be heard: “I can answer that particular question,” he says. “First of all, we’re an a-political band. If we’re asked questions, they should be about music. There are problems in Kinshasa, many problems, but they don’t concern us.” I point out that I’m not talking about politics, but rather a spirit of self-reliance. “If you can get hold of some money,” Coco answers, “then yes, with that spirit, you can build things like schools, where children can study, you can help friends too maybe…”

In our excitement about the potential of Kinshasa as a temple of creativity, it’s easy to forget that, in the end, it’s all about means and graft and courage. The band are well aware that, as they sit in a London hotel, talking to journalists, drinking coffee and playing with their smart phones, thousands back home are still tight-rope walking on the meagre line that separates survival from oblivion. “God pushes us to rediscover what we really see,” says R9, “so it’s a big feeling. What I can say to our friends who are still behind us, they have to work hard and give their energy to go further. No job is unworthy. Only people are unworthy. All that can be done, must be done, must be expressed. One mustn’t go backwards, or stay blocked; you have to give your energy, your inspiration. May we always remain mobile and work hard to prepare the future…”

The Congo Astronauts. (c) Renaud Barret

The video for ‘Mulkayi’, the first single by Mbongwana Star, is a remarkably innovative piece of work by any measure, doubly so if you consider the tiny budget Barret and Doctor L had at their disposal to shoot and edit it. It features a local character, a happening on two legs called The Congo Astronaut, who wanders around the ghetto in a space suit for no obvious reason other than to be seen, be noticed and be stylish. When Renaud ‘premiered’ the video on a huge screen at Kinshasa’s École des Beaux Arts, where the video was shot, the response was exhilarating, heartening. “Everybody was saying ‘that’s it! That’s us!’” Renaud recounts. “And when we played them Liam’s mixes of Mbongwana star, those guys said ’that’s our music! We want that! Our artistic imagery is completely incarnated in that music.’” Coco agreed: “I thought it was great. It made me happy.” Doctor L and Barret’s second video ‘Kala’, is zinging twitching black and white celebration of Kinshasa dance styles, filmed down alleyways, deep in the shanties, out on the drags. They’re working on a whole string of further videos in the same lo-fi System-K spirit.

If the master plan succeeds, Mbongwana Star could become the Trojan Horse that penetrates the bastion of the world’s indifference (and revulsion and paranoia) and lifts the curse to bring that creative power out of rue Kato, the Beaux Arts, and other parts of Kinshasa. “The Beaux Arts is like a town within a town,” says Renaud. “Mbongwana Star has started rehearsing there and there’s a correlation with visual artists, stylists, people working on logos etc. It’s this kind of electric movement, this new vibe in Kinshasa that we’re trying to mix in with the music and the image.”

Theo, Coco and the other members of Mbongwana Star are all aware of the talent that exists back home, and the potential ways in which it might transform their visual appearance and live show. But they remain patient: “All that will come bit by bit,” he says. “We have ideas, but we’re starting with what we’re doing right now and then, little by little we can add other things.”

The journey ahead may be long, but the time for lift-off has surely come. The Congo Astronaut has waiting long enough.

Andy Morgan,

Bristol, June 2015

The post MBONGWANA STAR – Kinshasa’s Afro-junk revolutionaries appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Souad Massi. Photo by Jean Baptiste Millot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2015

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

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A mujahid in northern Mali.

It ranges from the almost banal: a bunch of mates in the eastern Malian town of Gao are fingered by the Islamic Police. The Bob Marley tape they’ve been enjoying is impounded and instead they’re given one by Saudi Arabia’s star Quranic chanter, Sheik Abderrahmane Soudais. “No more Satanic sounds now lads,” the policeman says. “You have to listen to this.”

To the gut-slicingly terrifying: Seven men in a Toyota pickup draw up outside the house of a guitar player in Kidal, the far flung Malian desert town that is home to members of the Grammy Award winning band Tinariwen. Luckily, the musician, whose name cannot be given for security reasons, is away. “Well, if you speak to him,” one of the AK47 toting militiamen says to his sister, “tell him that if he ever shows his face in this town again, we’ll cut off all the fingers he uses to play his guitar with.” Then they drag years of patiently accumulated musical equipment out of the house – guitars, amps, speakers, mics and a drum kit – douse it all with petrol, and set it ablaze.

When a rabble of different Islamist groups took control of northern Mali in April this year everybody knew that the region’s rich and vivid music scene would suffer. But no one imagined that it would almost cease to exist, not in Mali, a country that, like Jamaica or Ireland, only really lives in the global imagination thanks to its culture and music.

“Culture is our petrol,” says Toumani Diabate, the world famous Malian kora player who has collaborated with Damon Albarn and Björk, to name but a few. “Music is our mineral wealth. There isn’t a single major music prize in the world today that hasn’t been won by a Malian artist.”

“Music regulates the life of every Malian,” adds Cheikh Tidiane Seck, a prolific Malian musician and producer. “From the cradle to the grave. From ancient times right up to today. A Mali without music? No…I mean…give me another one!!”

International observers claim that the leaders of the three armed Islamic groups who now control the northern Malian cities of Timbuktu, Kidal and Gao respectively, are motivated by money and power rather the dream of a Caliphate in the Sahel founded on piety and abnegation. Strong ties between these groups and the less than holy interests of major drug-traffickers and arms smugglers exist beyond doubt. But many of the mujahedeen that have zoned in on the conflict from all over the Muslim world are fired by an unquestionable religious zeal. The same goes for Iyad Ag Ghaly, ex-rebel leader, Touareg strong man and born again Salafist, who founded the Touareg-lead Ansar ud-Dine movement at the end of last year.

“He believes in what he’s doing,” says Manny Ansar, director of the world famous Festival in the Desert that has been taking place every January in and around Timbuktu and Kidal since 2001. “And that’s what frightens me. I’m not convinced that he wants to kill everyone who is not a Muslim, like the people in Al Qaida do, but I’ve seen him giving up the fruits of this life for God.”

Back in the 1990s, before he succumbed to the preaching of the Pakistani proselytising movement Tablighi Jama’at, Iyad Ag Ghali liked to smoke cigarettes and hang out with musicians from Tinariwen. He even composed songs and poems to love, rebellion and the beauty of his desert home. Now music, and with it a major source of communal cohesion and well being, has either disappeared or gone underground throughout the territory under his control.

An official decree banning all western music was issued on August 22d by a heavily bearded Islamist spokesperson in the city of Gao. “We don’t want the music of Satan. Quranic verses must take its place. Sharia demands it,” it went. The ban comes in the context of a horrifically literal and gratuitous application of Sharia law in all aspects of daily life. Militiamen are cutting off the hands and feet of thieves or stoning adulterers. Smokers, alcohol drinkers and women who aren’t properly attired are being publicly whipped. As one well-known Touareg musician from Kidal told me, “There’s a lack of joy. No one is dancing. There are no parties. Everybody’s under this kind of spell. It’s strange.”

“People think that the problem is new,” says Manny Ansar, “but the menace of Al Qaida started to have an effect on us in 2007. That’s when the Al Qaida people started to appear in the desert. They came to the nomad camps near Essakane [the beautiful dunes to the west of Timbuktu where the Festival in the Desert used to be held] and at first they were pleasant and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re Muslims like you.’ Then they began to say, ‘We have a common enemy, which is the west.’ That’s when I understood that things were going to get difficult.”

Remarkably, Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) never targeted the festival or any of the thousands of westerners who braved the journey to attend it. According to Manny Ansar, some people put down this to the fact that his tribe, the Kel Ansar, are said to be descended directly from the Prophet Mohammed and are highly revered. “Others even thought that we cast spells to block their route,” he says with a wry laugh. In truth, AQIM knew that if they wanted to keep the locals sweet and compliant, they were well advised not to mess with the Kel Ansar.

Not all music events were so blessed. Returning from the Tamadacht festival near the eastern town of Anderamboukane in January 2009, the British tourist Ediwn Dyer was kidnapped and sold to AQIM, who beheaded him four months later because the British government refused to pay a ransom for his release. This tragedy forced The Festival in the Desert to move into the safe confines of Timbuktu city limits in 2010.

This year in January, no doubt the last edition of the festival to be held in Timbuktu for a while took place in an atmosphere of high alert following recent kidnappings and the murder of a German tourist by Al Qaida. The event was attended by Tinariwen, a host of other Touareg and Malian musicians, and Bono. “I was impressed by Bono’s courage and that of his team,” Manny tells me. “He asked the soldiers who were assigned to protect him to leave him be and let him roam around the town freely or go and drink tea out on the dunes. But I wondered if I wasn’t a bit mad myself to let him do that. I mean, Bono, kidnapped! Imagine that.” La Maison, the hotel in Timbuktu where Bono and entourage stayed is now the headquarters of the city’s Islamic Tribunal.

Manny felt like giving up when the rebellion broke out a few days after the end of the festival. But after talking to many musicians, as well as friends and international backers, he decided to organise a Caravan of Peace and Unity that will tour West Africa and visit refugee camps in February next year. He’ll also be promoting the Festival in the Desert in Exile in Europe, the Middle East, the US and elsewhere. “It’s my way of fighting back,” he says. “Before our music was heard in Essakane. Now it’ll be heard in all the big festivals in the world. So it’s the opposite of what the Islamists want. It’s our victory and their defeat.”

Meanwhile, almost all the musicians in the north have fled the country like more than 500,000 of their fellow countrymen, most of who languish in refugee camps in Algeria, Mauritania, Niger or Burkina Faso. It’s the biggest humanitarian crisis the Sahel has ever known. “There’s no music up there any more,” says Vieux Farka Toure, son of the king of the West African blues, the late Ali Farka Toure. “You can’t switch on a radio or a TV, even at home.”

The town of Niafunké just south west of Timbuktu, where Ali Farka was mayor for many years, is now under Islamist control. “I know that if Ali were to awake from his tomb today,” says Afel Bocoum, Ali Farka’s former sidekick and Damon Albarn’s partner on the 2002 Mali Music project, “he would just go straight back into it. He would die twice.” Both Afel Bocoum and Vieux Farka Toure have fled south to the safety of the Malian capital Bamako with their families.

Down south however, music is also in crisis, for different but related reasons. The military coup that toppled President Toure on March 23^rd and kissed goodbye to one of Africa’s most lauded democracies has left the capital fearful and economically depressed. “People just aren’t used to meeting soldiers in the street,” says Adam Thiam, one of Mali’s leading journalists, “so they tend to stay at home.”

Many live music venues in the capital, like Le Diplomat, the espace culturel where Toumani Diabate and his Symmetric Orchestra used to play every weekend, have closed down. The same goes for hotels and restaurants, starved of their once plentiful foreign tourist clientele. Nightclubs and weddings are still thriving but the trend is to save money by hiring sound systems and DJs rather than live musicians. “People use what they earn to feed themselves, not to have fun,” says Bassekou Kouyate.

But in West Africa nowadays, when the going gets tough, the rappers get going. Like Y’en A Marre, the rap collective that ignited nationwide debate during the election crisis in Senegal last year, rappers in Mali have stepped up to denounce political skulduggery, Islamism and military rule.

“I don’t give a f**k what they say,” was Malian rapper Amkoullel’s terse answer to my question about the Islamist ban on music in the north. “We won’t let them get away with it. We don’t need them to teach us how to be Muslims. We’re a secular tolerant country, where everyone declares their religion according to their feeling. And in any case, they know that a Mali without music is an impossibility.”

Amkoullel set up his own pressure group of rappers, activists and friends called Plus Jamais Ça (Never Again). So far he’s released a couple of videos, including one called ‘SOS’, which has become a You Tube hit. It’s also been censored by the state broadcaster ORTM, which is still under the heavy hand of the military.

“We had this feeling that a heavy blow had been dealt to democracy,” Amkoullel says of the March 23^rd putsch. “And it had been done in a period of popular disillusion. It’s as if in the collective consciousness, democracy was a failure in Mali.” Like Les Sofas de la Republique, the other rap collective raising the standard in rhyme for unity, democracy, peace and good governance, Amkoullel and his team have been organising demonstrations, debates and gigs. He’s also received three death threats.

“I knew that our phones were being bugged,” he tells me. “Then I got this call that was like ‘Yeah…we’re watching you, so you’d better calm down or take the consequences.’ The second message wasn’t from the same person. ‘You’re talking too much’, they said. ‘Shut up or you’ll disappear and won’t understand a thing.’ That was much clearer!”

All the musicians I spoke to agreed; Mali without music would be like Egypt without cotton, a bird without wings, a man without a soul. “I’m a Muslim, but Sharia isn’t my thing,” says Rokia Traore, one of Mali’s most famous international stars. “If I couldn’t go up on stage anymore, I would cease to exist. And without music, Mali will cease to exist.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2012

First published in The Guardian (edited version) – June 2012

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Bombino at home in Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013. (c) Andy Morgan.

A small white car, branded with the words ‘Groupe Bambino’ and a crudely drawn electric guitar, is revving its wheels deeper and deeper into the soft sand of a side alley somewhere on the ragged outskirts of Niamey, the capital of Niger. Bombino cuts the engine and smiles. “I should have taken the turn at speed in second gear,” he chuckles at me without a hint of fluster. “But I had to answer my phone so I screwed up. No bother. We’ll just leave the car here and dig it out later.”

While he and his band unload their bush gear – guitars, battery powered amp, djembe, tea pot and stove – a gaggle of local kids gather around us to point and stare. They recognise Bombino instantly and giggle with excitement. He beams them a smile before sauntering off into the scrubland with his bandmates, his purple robe all a shimmer in the evening light.

Such escapes from the city’s noise and stress are a daily ritual for Bombino. “There’s no better place to play music than in the desert,” he tells me. “In complete tranquility.”

In normal times, Niamey is a laid-back place, sprawling along the banks of the great Niger River with plenty of greenery to break the monotony of shantytowns and dusty suburbs. But the Malian civil war is raging away only half a day’s drive north of here and a pall of paranoia has descended on the city. When I receive an invitation to join Bombino and his mates for a jam, a smoke and a round or two of Touareg tea up on the dunes beyond the city limits, it feels like something heaven-sent.

As we wander along a dried riverbed in the twilight hush, past mud and reed villages where women pounding their grain to salute Bombino, his mobile rings again. It’s his manager calling from the USA. Bombino gets plenty of calls from his manager these days. His new album Nomad, produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, is set for imminent worldwide release. North American and European tours are in the offing. The grinding carousel of showbiz duty beckons.

Bombino has been charting a steady international ascent since his last album Agadez and a documentary of the same name came out in 2010. Nomad, with its indi-fanboy-friendly rock distortion and jubilant desert wig-outs seems likely to make this 33-year old Touareg guitarist more famous on the international stage than any other Touareg musician in history besides Tinariwen.

What’s more extraordinary however is Bombino’s fame at home. He’s become a bona fide head-turning airtime-hogging star in his own country, not just amongst the Touareg, who mainly live in Niger’s northern deserts, but amongst the youth of the entire nation, including those belonging to other major ethnic groups such as the Hausa, Jerma and Toubou. That’s something that no other Touareg artists has ever managed to do, not even Tinariwen.

Bombino downs le premier, Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013. (c) Andy Morgan

Anyone who knows anything about the recent history of the Touareg, a nomadic people from the southern Sahara whose ancestral homelands were sliced up when frontiers were drawn across the Sahara in the early 1960s, will appreciate the groundbreaking importance of Bombino’s achievement. Now a marginalised minority in Algeria, Mali, Niger, Libya and Burkina Faso, the Touareg possess a deep and rich culture, but never before have they enjoyed any kind of cultural hegemony in their home nations. “There are plenty of people here in Niger who listen to our music but don’t understand our lyrics because we sing in a different language to theirs,” Bombino tells me with quiet pride. “But they like it. And thanks to Facebook and You Tube, our fans here can see what we’re doing all over the world.”

Now Bombino wants to convince the rest of the world that the Touareg are a tolerant and peace-loving people who are only trying to protect their millennial culture and essential freedoms. Not that the world ever needed convincing until a few years ago. For decades, the Touareg enjoyed a generally benign image as an oppressed Berber people who were impervious to the rabidly puritanical version of Islam that prevails in the Middle East and proud of their age-old nomadic ways, their music and their poetry.

Recently however, the Touareg name has been dragged through the mud thanks to its association with the rise of radical and violent jihadism in the Sahel. The truth is that only a small clique of Malian Touareg leaders, rather than the population as a whole, ever sought any kind of alliance with violent Al Qaida franchised terror groups in northern Mali. Despite this, the Touareg as a whole are now regularly lumped together with the mad spawn of Bin Laden in the mind of ill-informed global-war-on-terror bores the world over. No less of an ‘expert’ in West African affairs than Jeremy Clarkson was recently moved to refer to the Touareg as a bunch of gun-running terrorists during an episode of Top Gear.

“That man has no right to say that,” retorts Bombino when I tell him about Clarkson’s rebranding of his people. “History speaks for itself. The Touareg have never behaved in that way. Many of us never expected this outcome, or this connection. Because of two or three people, our entire community is suffering. It’s very serious because the future of our people hangs in the balance. France should have intervened five or ten years ago, when the terrorists first arrived in our desert. Now it must finish the battle it’s fighting in Mali. Because if it doesn’t, I’m telling you, things will explode.”

Bombino isn’t alone in thinking that only the French army stands in the way of all out ethnic war in northern Mali. Reports of Malian army attacks against innocent Touareg and Arab civilians have been stacking up in recent weeks. The blood of most southern Malians has been boiled into a fury by what they perceive to be Touareg complicity in their country’s calamitous fall from grace. In many ways, the future has never seemed more dark and threatening.

Bombino and the company car, Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013. (c) Andy Morgan

Which is why it has never been more urgent for Touareg musicians to speak up and educate the world about what’s really going on in the Sahel. But I get the impression that penning lyrical messages of urgent relelvance isn’t Bombino’s natural vocation. Many of the songs on Nomad are Touareg classics by other Touareg groups such as Tinariwen and Terakaft, whose lyrics have been stripped of their deeper poetry and boiled down to whoops and catchphrases that play a supporting role to the rolling desert grooves. “We interpret those songs in our own way, sometimes with our own lyrics” he says. “I like to play an old song which still moves people and at the same time give it a new sound, a new shape, just a bit faster and more energetic than before.”

The message and the poetry, both of which have been essential ingredients in most Touareg music until now, are a work in progress as far as Bombino is concerned. “We’ve begun to work on that aspect these past four or five months,” he offers when I try to probe, “because it’s very important to talk about those issues, to make people understand, to go beyond tribalism.”

Dan Auberbach’s instinctive ability to distil the essence of rock’n’roll and the blues has helped Bombino to perfect a whole new approach to Touareg music – a youthful, almost urban sound that’s resolutely anchored in the here and now. Its main ingredients are raw and rolling dance grooves and long dazzling displays of guitar work rather than lyrical subtlety or the urge to sharpen the minds of audiences back home.

This break with the past is partly intentional of course. “I have a huge respect for the old generation,” Bombino says, “but we’re in 2013 now. We can’t always remain in 1963 [the year of the first Touareg uprising in Mali]. Some of the old musicians are always in a state of revolt. But people must find another way. We must stop thinking in tribal terms, as Touareg or Hausas or whatever. We have to go beyond that.”

Nonetheless, like any Touareg musician of any age, Bombino has no intention of burning all the bridges to his past. That would be culturally impossible. “In some ways my style is a city sound,” he concedes. “But in truth, underneath, the open desert is always there. If you forget your beginnings, you’ll be like a tree without roots. Unstable.”

Bombino and band off to jam outside Niamey, Niger, Feb 2013 (c) Andy Morgan

Hence Bombino’s need for his daily fix of desert tranquillity on the dunes near his home in Niamey, mobile phones and adoring fans notwithstanding. The deep yearning Touareg feels for those infinite Saharan horizons with their blessed freedom from noise, pollution, crowds and time remains at the core of Bombino’s music. It’s also tattooed on his heart. And although he might not possess the lyrical skills of Touareg mentors like Ibrahim Abaraybone or Mohammed Japonais, Bombino cares deeply about what’s going on in his desert home.

“We’ve already suffered enough,” he tells me, those gentle deep-brown eyes tenderising his words. “We don’t want to be like Afghanistan. We only want peace. I don’t think that’s a lot to ask.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 20013

First published in The Guardian – April 2013

The post BOMBINO – Revving up beyond the sand appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Kinshasa Cellist © Vincent Boisot / Riva Press for Le Figaro Magazine. www.vincentboisot.com

Nathalie is a single-mum who struggles to clothe her little boy and pay the rent. She plays the flute and the sax. Josephine gets up at 4.30am every morning to sell omelettes at the market. She’s in the chorus. Papy is a part-time mechanic who also runs his own pharmacy. He plays the tuba. Josef is a freelance electrician, a kind of African version of the Robert de Niro character in the film ‘Brazil’. He also runs his own hair salon and plays the viola.

Nathalie, Josephine, Papy and Josef are adepts of the Congolese art of debrouillardise, a French word that means ‘getting by’, ‘making ends meet’ and ‘surviving’. Their lives are oddly schizophrenic. For most of the day they do whatever they must to hustle their daily bread in the Congolese capital Kinshasa, one of the biggest, noisiest and most dysfunctional cities on earth. Then in the early evening they set out on a journey that often takes several hours to go and rehearse with The Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste de Kinshasa, the only all-black symphony orchestra in the world. There they find release from their daily cares. “When I sing Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony, it takes me far away,” says one of the other singers in the choir. “I’m not here any more,” .

“They come because they’re passionate about music,” says Armand Diangienda, the man who founded the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbaguiste almost twenty years ago. “It gives them something more in terms of confidence, of feeling capable and of being able to contribute to a collective endeavour.”

If the musicians in the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste are masters of individual survival, the orchestra itself is an epic example of debrouillardise, of thinking the impossible and then just doing it. Armand Diangienda lost his job as a pilot when the Fokker F-27 he used to fly across the Congo crashed into the hills above the town of Goma in 1992, killing all 37 people on board. Luckily, he was on holiday at the time. Finding himself unemployed, he rallied some of the followers of his father’s church, the hugely popular Kimbanguiste Church, and created a symphony orchestra, a strange endeavour for a confirmed reggae fan who had only a passing interest in European classical music at the time.

“We told ourselves that creating a symphony orchestra would be great because the church already had a brass band, a flute orchestra, a guitar ensemble and a number of different choirs,” Armand tells me over a distorted phone line from Kinshasa. “I couldn’t read music but driven by my passion and with help from my friends I gradually learned.”

In the early days, instruments had to be borrowed or made from scratch by reverse engineering. Violin strings had to be concocted from bicycle brake wire. Hundreds of scores had to be copied out by hand. Arrangements to symphonic works by Mozart and Beethoven had to be deciphered by listening to the works on CD, over and over again. Music stands had to be cobbled together from old pieces of wood.

Despite attracting huge interest locally, the Orchestra remained a secret until two German film-makers, Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer, made a film about it called Kinshasa Symphony, which was released in 2010. It’s one of the most beautiful and honest portrayals of the power of music and the human spirit that I’ve seen in ages.

Last year, the Orchestra travelled outside Africa for the first time, performing at the TED conference in California and later in Monaco with the Monaco Symphony Orchestra. CBS devoted a hour coverage to them and Peter Gabriel joined them for a gala soirée to raise funds for a music school in Kinshasa.

But that’s not all. Armand Diangienda is on his way to London to become an honorary member of London’s Royal Philharmonic Society, an accolade previously granted to the likes of Mendelssohn, Rossini, Wagner, Brahms and Stravinsky. “The day I was told I had tears in my eyes,” Diangienda says.

The fact that many Congolese regard Armand Diangienda as something of a living God has no doubt helped him to achieve the seemingly impossible. His grandfather, Simon Kimbangu, was a healer and preacher whose sermons instilled pride and self-belief in ordinary Congolese people and deep fear in their Belgian colonial masters. He died in 1951 after spending thirty years in prison. One of his most prophetic statements was “The black man will become white and the white man will become black.”

For Armand Diangienda however, performing western classical music on the banks of the Congo river has nothing to do with turning his back on his own African culture. “Everything we’re learning by playing classical music will allow us to enrich our own music as well and immortalise it by writing it down,” he says. Diangienda himself, and the orchestra’s first violinist Heritier Malumbi and bassoonist Balongi, have already composed several original symphonic works full of rich Congolese flavours.

“My grandfather claimed that to sing was to pray twice,” Diangienda says. “Music is already a form of spiritual wealth to us, the Kimbanguistes. But what inspires me even more is that my grandfather’s message was a universal one; a message of peace, of love, of reaching out for others and bringing people together.”

It was also a message about work, perseverance and self-respect. The stirring finale of Kinshasa Symphony sees the Orchestra performing Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on a large piece of waste ground in front of an ecstatic local crowd. The beauty, pride and common purpose that oozes from the performance make mincemeat of the clichés of chaos and hopelessness that burden the Congo. A small but growing group of cognoscenti already know that Kinshasa is one of the most culturally dynamic and creative cities on earth, and OSK only reinforce that conviction.

So here’s another prophecy: sometime in the future, in 30, 50 or a 100 years time, Kinshasa will rival the Paris of the 1920s or the London of the 1960s in terms of its impact on global culture. By then, by the grace of Simon Kimbangu himself, the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste will be old and venerated and Armand Diangienda’s most cherished dreams will have come true.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2013

First published in The Guardian – May 2013

The post KINSHASA SYMPHONY – The art of Haydn and debrouillardise appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Songhoy Blues, Bamako, Feb 2012. (L-R) Garba, Ali, Nathaniel, Omar. (c) Andy Morgan.

Garba Touré and his guitar were a familiar sight on the streets of Diré, a dusty town on the banks on the Niger River, upstream from Timbuktu. But when armed jihadists took control of northern Mali in the spring of 2012, he knew it was time to leave.

“The first rebel group to arrive were the MNLA, but they weren’t against music, so there was no bad feeling between them and the population,” he tells me over the phone from the Malian capital Bamako. “But then Ansar Dine [‘Followers of the Faith’ – a local armed Islamist group] came and chased them out. They ordered people to stop smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and playing music. Even though I don’t smoke or drink, I love the guitar, so I thought, ‘this isn’t the moment to hang around. I have to go south.’”

Like many other thousands of refugees, Garba grabbed a bag, his guitar and boarded a bus to Bamako. His father, Oumar Toure, a famous musician who had played congas for Mali’s guitar legend, Ali Farka Toure, stayed behind with the family. The hard line Islamist gunmen drove music underground. The penalties for playing or even just listening to it on your mobile were a public whipping, a stint in an overcrowded jail or worse.

“When I arrived in Bamako the mood wasn’t great,” Garba remembers, “Different army factions were fighting each other. There were guns everywhere. All we heard was the scream of weapons. We weren’t used to that.”

Garba and some other musician friends from the north decided they couldn’t succumb to the feeling that their lives had been shipwrecked by the crisis. They had to form a band, if for no other reason than to boost the morale of other refugees like them. “We wanted to recreate that lost ambiance of the north and make all the refugees relive those northern songs.”

That’s how Songhoy Blues was born. ‘Songhoy’ because Garba Toure, lead vocalist Aliou Toure and second guitarist Oumar Toure, although unrelated to each other – ‘Toure’ is the equivalent of ‘Smith’ or ‘Jones’ northern Mali – all belong to the Songhoy people, one of the main ethnicities in the north. And ‘Blues’, not only because northern Mali is the cradle of the blues and its music is often referred to as ‘the desert blues’, but also because Garba and his mates are obsessed by that distant American cousin of their own blues. “My father used to make me listen to Jimi Hendrix. He’s one of my idols. But I also listen BB King and John Lee Hooker a lot.”

After signing up drummer Nathanael Dembélé from the local conservatoire, Songhoy Blues hit the Bamako club and maquis (a kind of local spit ‘n’ grit bar restaurant) circuit with their raucous guitar anthems dedicated to peace and reconciliation. People flocked to see them, not only fellow Songhoy, but also Touareg and other northern ethnicities. Even southerners came.

Anybody familiar with the enmity between the Songhoy and Touareg peoples left behind by Mali’s recent civil war will appreciate the how inspiring it must have been to see Touareg and Songhoy youth wigging out together in a Bamako bar.

Last September, an uncle told Garba that a group of European and American musicians and producers were coming to town under the banner of Africa Express. Garba called Marc-Antoine Moreau, one of the Africa Express organisers and, after passing an informal audition, Songhoy Blues were introduced to Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, whose surname Garba pronounces Zeiner.

“Marco told us that Nick was a big American guitarist and asked us to collaborate with him. So the next day we went into the studio and did some takes with Nick. Everything went well, no problem. He’s a very simple person; a great guitarist but really modest.” The word simple is just about the greatest compliment a Malian can pay to another person. In the Malian French patois it means honest, down-to-earth and solid as a rock.

“We just walked into the studio not knowing what to expect,” Zinner recalls. “There was just one amp between all of us, so it was like ‘What are we gonna do here?’ But then they showed up, sat down, said ‘hi’, and thirty seconds later they were playing music, amazing music.”

One result of these sessions a track called ‘Soubour’ which means ‘patience’. “We’re asking the refugees to have patience,” Garba explains. “Without patience, nothing is possible.” A video of ‘Sobour’ featuring Zinner and friends has now gone viral. Is the rawest, spikiest and most electrifying dollop of desert r’n’b you’re likely to hear this year or next, but it remains proudly Malian and African.

Working with musicians who had just seen music outlawed in their homeland was humbling experience for Zinner. “It’s impossible for a westerner like myself to imagine it,” he says. “Like, truly unfathomable. And knowing the reasons why a lot of the musicians that we were working and hanging out with had come to Bamako really added another dimension to the whole experience. Like…a real intensity.”

Like the great majority of Malian Muslims, Garba has no truck with hard line Salafist attitudes to music. “The world without music? It would be like a prison, right?,” he says. “Music causes no harm and what’s more you can educate an entire population using music. Maybe in previous generations, music could have been condemned by religion, but not now.”

Africa Express has invited Songhoy Blues to London to appear at the launch of Maison des Jeunes (Transgressive), the album of recordings made last October during the Bamako trip. Songhoy Blues and other emerging Malian talents, like the seraphim-voiced Kankou Kouyate, who is also appearing at the launch, feature alongside Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Ghostpoet, Nick Zinner and an eclectic mix of other artists and producers. To Garba and his fellow band-members, the whole experience has been like a dream that dropped out of a deep blue African sky.

“There we were living in the north,” he says. “We were told that if we played music we could get our hands chopped off. Then we arrived in Bamako, in a state of emergency. We had to go to the Ministry of the Interior to ask for permission to play. But then, by the grace of God, the atmosphere returned. Africa Express came and we were invited to play in London. Really and truly, it’s an explosive joy for us, an explosive joy! We can’t even begin to explain that joy.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2013

First published in The Guardian – December 2013

The post SONGHOY BLUES – “Without patience, nothing is possible” appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

A camel procession at the Nuits Sahariennes d’Essouk Festival, Essouk, Adagh 2007. (c) Andy Morgan

I wrote this article when the uprising that later plunged Mali into its worst crisis since independence was only weeks old. Most people outside Mali, the Sahara, or the tiny community of international Sahara ‘experts’, were racing to update their understanding of a region that had hitherto been largely ignored. Having been blessed with the opportunity to visit Kidal and the north east of Mali on various occasions as manager of Tinariwen, I felt obliged to weigh in with whatever I knew about the Adagh region of northeastern Mali, its people and its struggles, just to try and provide a little ballast to the breathless ‘semi-blind’ international debate that had suddenly blown up around Mali for the first time in its history.  I hoped that this would be useful especially to anglophone observers, who tended to know even less about the issue that their Francophone counterparts.

Reading through the article now I realise that, like many other interested parties, I was guilty of some naivety at the time. I wasn’t ‘in situ’ (no journalists were), and I underestimated the power and ‘infiltration’ of both AQIM and Iyad ag Ghali’s Ansar Dine.  To be fair, most people did, especially those who had had dealings with the Touareg of northern Mali for years and who couldn’t quite believe that Iyad, a hero of Touareg nationalism, could suddenly be flying the black flag of jihad and claiming that he had no interest in an independent Azawad.  I still hold to my bald statement that “In truth, neither Ghadafi’s fall nor AQIM nor drugs and insecurity are the prime movers behind this latest revolt. They’re just fresh opportunities and circumstances in a very old struggle.”  For most people involved, Islamism and Jihad are proxies for deeper desires for security, cultural independence, opportunity, economic gain etc etc.  I say ‘most’, because there are of course plenty of idealists fighting under the jihadi banner in places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. But I also believe there are also more ‘realists’ involved than we dare to imagine: young men who have seen every path to peace, security and happiness closed to them and feel they only have Islam, the Quran and the kalash left.  

I also detect naivety in my analysis of the MNLA and their preparations for the uprising. Their desire to avoid previous failures was genuine, but they also made some blunt mistakes, not least their short-lived association with Ansar Dine and by extension, with AQIM, during the latter part of March and early 2012.  So if you still have the courage to read on, all I can say is thanks for attention and your forbearance, Andy (July 2014).

“Long live Azawad!” “May Allah Bless Mali!”

Through December and early January, the tone of the exchanges on various Touareg chat forums was expectant, frustrated, even desultory at times. Everybody knew something big was about to happen. They had known for some time already. But when exactly?. The wait was excruciating. Then, on the morning of Tuesday, January 17^th 2012, a new Touareg rebel group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) attacked the town of Menaka in the north east of Mali.

Messages of support and relief poured in from Mali, Niger, Libya, France, Saudi Arabia and the entire Touareg diaspora. “The hour has come. We urge all Azawadians to lend their hand in the fight to liberate our Azawad,” wrote a blogger called Targui Rebel Boy. “Aguel’hoc is free and now we’re going to liberate Tessalit. Vive Azawad!” wrote another surfer. “The flag of Azawad is floating everywhere, even over some towns that have not yet been conquered,” and “Long live Azawad, long live Freedom!” went the patriotic outpouring. One online sympathiser, with an almost Churchillian grasp of the magnitude of the moment, urged everyone to make a note of the date, “for 17^th January 2012 will live for ever in history.”

There was also internet traffic bearing different perspectives and different emotions of course. As the MNLA quickly moved on from Menaka to attack the towns of Tessalit and Aguel’hoc further north, and casualties began to be reported on both sides, some Touareg bloggers questioned the wisdom of taking up arms once more against the central powers in Bamako, the capital of Mali. “War is always ugly,” they claimed. “Dialogue is always better.”

The Malian press meanwhile sharpened its fangs and unleashed a torrent of invective against the Touareg rebels, calling them “armed bandits”, “drug traffickers”, “AQIM collaborators” and “Ghadafi mercenaries.” The news agency, Agence France Press, picked up and relayed these same catchphrases throughout the world, in reports that seemed to rely almost entirely on Malian army sources for their version of what was actually happening 1,200 km away in the far north east of the country. Southern Malian bloggers were even cruder and more violent in their attacks. “A warning to those little wankers from the North…Fun time is over!” read the text accompanying a video of elite Malian army units parading in front of President Amadou Toumani Touré. “Those rebels don’t know about dialogue. They must be killed, killed, killed!” and “May God save Mali from this useless war!” or “Long live the Malian army…may Allah bless Mali!”

The international press lead with the angles of the story that are of greatest concern to the international community; The fallout from Ghadafi’s overthrow and Islamic terrorism in the shape of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The general assumption was that this new uprising was a direct result of the Libyan civil war and of the weaponry and demobbed Ghadafi mercenaries that flooded back down into the Sahel to the lands of their origin in the wake of the dictator’s demise. Another generally accepted viewpoint was that the north east of Mali had become a cauldron of crime, islamic terrorism and insecurity, and that the MNLA were but a symptom of the the furies that plague this deeply dysfunctional corner of the southern Sahara.

Neither Ghadafi’s fall nor AQIM are the prime movers.

In truth, neither Ghadafi’s fall nor AQIM nor drugs and insecurity are the prime movers behind this latest revolt. They’re just fresh opportunities and circumstances in a very old struggle. The first rebellion of the nomadic Touareg, (or Kel Tamashek – ‘the Tamashek speaking people’ – as they prefer to be known) against the central government of Mali broke out in 1963 when a young renegade called Alladi Ag Alla attacked two camel-mounted policemen or goumiers in a remote region north of the town of Kidal. Mali had only just won its independence from France, and the Kel Tamashek, detached from world events in their far flung desert home, simply could not understand why their cherished independence and age old nomadic culture had been subsumed into a new state ruled by black Africans living hundreds of miles away who had never proved their right nor their fitness to become the Touareg’s new masters. It was to be six years before Ghadafi grabbed power in Libya in a military coup and 44 years before the Algerian terrorist group, the GSPC, rebranded itself as AQIM and became the north African franchise of a successful global Islamic terror movement.

That first Touareg uprising in 1963 lasted barely a year before it was crushed with unforgettable brutality by the Malian army under the command of the infamous Captain Diby Sillas Diarra, the ‘butcher’ of Kidal. The northeast of Mali then became a no-go area ruled by martial law. The 1970s and 1980s were decades of extreme drought and suffering in the region that saw many thousands of Kel Tamashek flee their homelands and take refuge in the neighbouring countries of Algeria, Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Burkina Faso. They say that the word ‘Touareg’ means something like ‘abandoned by God’ in Arabic, and in those years of drought and exile, this foreign name seemed cruelly apt.

In June 1990, the second great Touareg rebellion broke out when Iyad Ag Ghali, the leader of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MPLA), attacked a police post in Menaka with a small group of soldiers recently returned from army camps in Libya. The parallels with the outbreak of these latest hostilities are stark. The 1990 uprising ended in an Algerian brokered peace treaty and the National Pact of 1992. The Touareg movement then dissolved into a bitter soup of acrimony and acronyms as the MPLA split along ethnic and tribal fault lines into four different factions. The northeast was given a certain measure of self-determination by the government in Bamako. Rebel leaders and soldiers were ‘re-inserted’ into the Malian army and administration. But the main clauses of the National Pact were never honoured, and Kel Tamashek resentment simmered away for the next fourteen years. On 23^rd May 2006 a new rebel group, the Democratic Alliance of May 23^rd for Change (ADC) attacked Malian army installations in Kidal and Menaka before retreating to a well stocked base in the Tegharghar hills north of Kidal. Algeria once again stepped in to broker a new peace deal and a new treaty, known as the Algiers Accords, which basically restated many of the demands made in the National Pact. These included greater autonomy for the Kidal region, greater recognition of the Tamashek language and culture in the national media and in education, the formation of special security units staffed by local Touareg, economic development in the region, a proper airport for Kidal and a special tax regime for the north to encourage investment. For the next six years the north eastern of Mali grumbled and groaned under an uneasy peace, while the refusenik Touareg war lord Ibrahim Ag Bahanga kept the flame of revolt alive by attacking the army and taking hostages and the implementation of the Algiers Accords stalled, then ground to a halt amid bitter accusations and recriminations on both sides.   On January 17^th of this year, it all kicked off again. For the Kel Tamashek, this is the fourth roll of the dice in a very long struggle for autonomy.

This uprising is different

The mild cynicism of some veteran observers of Saharan politics as they contemplate yet another uprising in the north of Mali can be forgiven. Previous revolts have adhered to a certain pattern of failure that has repeated itself in varying degrees: a group of well connected and disgruntled Kel Tamashek community leaders, usually all veterans of the great 1990 uprising, form a new rebel group with a freshly minted acronym. They attack a Malian army base in Menaka, Kidal or Tinzawaten, kill a few soldiers, then retreat to the hills as soon as reinforcements loom on the horizon and wait there while politicians in Bamako, Tripoli or Algiers work out a way of getting everyone around the negotiating table. Then a deal is thrashed out which comprises the enticing lure of financial incentives for the rebel foot soldiers and ‘jobs for the boys’ in the administration or the army for the rebel leaders. A pact or accord is signed, the rebels go back home and the Malian government proceeds to ignore most of its promises. The frustration mounts again over a number years, and, when the requisite level of tension and dissatisfaction is reached, the whole process repeats itself. Meanwhile, the average Touareg man, woman and child slips deeper into despondency, unemployment, poverty and general despair.

However, there are a number of key reasons why this latest uprising is different from all the others. First and foremost the level of preparation and forethought on the rebel side is unique in Touareg rebel history. In 1990, Iyad ag Ghali and his small troupe reportedly went into battle armed with two old hunting carbines and a length of rope. In 1963 the Touareg arsenal comprised a few old Mauser rifles alongside traditional takouba swords. In 2006 the rebels were better armed, allegedly by Algeria, but the rebel movement wasn’t primed for a long battle. In 2012, the MNLA have assembled one of the most impressive arsenals ever seen in the north of Mali.

Some of the MNLA’s weaponry has come from Libya. Some it was already in Mali. Some of it has been stolen from weapons stores by Touareg and Arab officers and soldiers who have deserted the Malian army. What is now becoming clear however is that the process of assembling this impressive stockpile of weaponry, and bringing together the soldiers and officers that would eventually use it, was part of a carefully preconceived plan that had been several years in the execution. The main man behind that plan was Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, Mali’s public enemy number one and the recalcitrant hero of hawkish Touareg everywhere.

Ibrahim Ag Bahanga – The man who had a plan

A veteran of the 1990 rebellion, Ag Bahanga was one of the leaders of the 2006 uprising, alongside Iyad Ag Ghali, Hassan Ag Fagaga and Ahmed Ag Bibi. However, he soon grew disgruntled with the compromises that his fellow rebels in the ADC seemed prepared to make in their negotiations with Mali, and their willingness to hand in their arms before any of the promises made by the Malian government had been delivered. In September 2007, Ag Bahanga formed a new splinter group called the Northern Malian Touareg Alliance for Change (ATNMC). For the next year and half, until he was finally driven off Malian soil by Malian army-backed militias, Ag Bahanga lead a campaign of harassment and terror against the Malian army and security apparatus. It included kidnapping upwards of 80 Malian soldiers and holding them hostage for months, and a number of ambushes and daring raids against army posts, especially the one in Tinzawaten, a village right up against Mali’s border with Algeria, which was Ag Bahanga’s ancestral home and fiefdom.

After his defeat in February 2009 and the disbanding of the ATNMC rebel camps, Ag Bahanga was given refuge in Libya. He then dipped off the media radar screen for almost two years, until his return to Mali in January 2011.   It now appears that far from idly luxuriating in some grace and favour Libyan villa on Ghadafi’s pay roll, Ag Bahanga used his time in Libya to conceive and execute a master plan designed to give the Touareg movement a military capacity that would offer it at least some hope of fighting a successful war against Mali. He began to talk to a group of 1990 rebel veterans who had left Mali in disgust after the signing of the 1992 National Pact and become senior officers in the Libyan army, commanding special elite units set up by Ghadafi to fight his desert wars. Most prominent among them was Colonel Mohammed Ag Najm.

When the first cracks began to appear in the foundations of the Ghadafi dictatorship, shortly after protests began in Benghazi in February 2011, Ag Bahanga and a few close allies set about putting their plan into action. They got to work persuading Ag Najm and his fellow Touareg officers in the Libyan army to abandon their posts and return to Mali with as much weaponry as possible. By early summer, as the Ghadafi regime started to disintegrate, Ag Bahanga’s plan was already well on the road. Touareg army defectors travelled south west in convoys with large stocks of arms and ammunition, including BM21 and BTR60 ground to ground and ground to air missiles. The Libyan returnees set up camps in Zakak, Tin Assalak and Takalote, all locations in the remote Tegharghar hills not far from Kidal. More arms and more defectors kept arriving and both Mali and the international community started to become increasingly worried.

On the afternoon of August 26^th, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga was killed in a car crash not far from his base at Tin Assalak. He had many enemies: the Malian army, the Malian people, other Touareg leaders who resented his uncompromising belligerence, Arab drug traffickers whom he had confronted and robbed on numerous occasions and the secret services of both Algeria and Libya for whom Ag Bahanga was often an intolerable liability. Nonetheless, many who knew Ag Bahanga well and were close to him deny any dark dimension to his death, claiming that he perished when his vehicle somersaulted at speed on one of the desert’s dirt tracks. Others say that his vehicle was shot to pieces by arms smugglers, or drug traffickers or a branch of Al Qaida, possibly all three of these in one.   Whatever happened, his death left a large hole in the bourgeoning revolutionary project, but it wasn’t large enough to stop it.

Ghadafi and the Touareg were never good friends nor faithful allies.

Colonel Ag Najm and his fellow Touareg officers’ abandonment of the Ghadafi cause and the general pilfering of Libyan arms by Touareg from northeastern Mali goes some way to contradicting those who insist that the Touareg have always been ardent Ghadafi loyalists and blind allies in his games of power and terror.   Since the mid 1970s, the relationship between Ghadafi and the Touareg has been one of mutual opportunism rather than shared ideals or common destiny. When the Touareg needed a refuge from poverty, drought and joblessness in the 1970s, oil-rich and underpopulated Libya was one of the countries they turned to. When the nascent Touareg rebel movement needed someone to fund their struggle for self-determination in the 1980s, Ghadafi provided army training, a base, some equipment and financial backing. The fact that he then went on to use ‘his’ Touareg fighters in his wars against Chad and Israel whilst never demonstrating any real desire to make the Touareg revolt actually happen, reveals the Libyan dictator’s true intentions.

During the 1990s and 2000s, Ghadafi uttered many fine words about being a nomad and a spiritual brother of the Touareg, and about how the Sahara should be a borderless region, free to all his native sons and daughters. In truth he played double games with aplomb, funding Touareg dissent with small occasional gifts whilst investing enormous sums of money in the energy, water, industry and tourism infrastructure of Mali as a whole. “Ghadafi never helped us,” a veteran of the 1990 rebellion once said to me. “He never did anything for the north. All the money he spent went to the south. We helped him, not the other way around.” When Ghadafi finally starting loosing the Libyan civil war, the greatest demonstrations of support for his regime didn’t occur in the northern parts of Mali, among the Touareg, as some might have expected. They occurred in the heart of the capital Bamako, where tens of thousands of southern Malians took to the streets to voice their approval of the Libyan dictator and their hatred of the USA, Britain, France and the United Nations.

Ghadafi and the Touareg were never really good friends or faithful allies. They were never more than partners in a game of coincidental self-interest. True, there were many Touareg fighting on the Ghadafi side in last year’s Libyan civil war. But they were often obliged or paid to do so. It was matter of expediency rather than belief. Through times of drought and marginalisation in the 1980s and 1990s, and even right up until last year, anything has often seemed preferable to a life of poverty and starvation back in the Malian desert, including a stint the Libyan army. And it must also be remembered that a sizeable number of Touareg also fought for the National Transitional Council (NTC) against Ghadafi. So did many Imazighen or Berbers, a fact that is often forgotten by both western powers and die-hard Arab supremacists in Libya.

In an extraordinarily frank and revealing interview given to the Algerian newspaper El Watan just a few days before his death, Ag Bahanga didn’t mince his words about Ghadafi: “[his fall] is good news for all the Touareg of the region,” he said. “The aims of the colonel [Ghadafi] have always been opposed to our aspirations. All he ever did was try to use the Touareg for his own ends and to the detriment of the community. His departure from Libya opens a new path to a better future and allows us to progress in our political demands… Ghadafi was a barrier to every solution of the Touareg question.”

Brain storming at the Zakak base – The eternal problem of disunity.

With Bahanga gone, the build up of arms and soldiers in the north east of Mali continued. In early October, all the various leaders of a burgeoning new Touareg rebel movement gathered together in the Zakak base for what can only be described as ten days of soul-searching and brain storming. “We discussed the past errors of certain leaders of the movement,” says Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed, who was Ibrahim Ag Bahanga’s father-in-law and spokesperson of his ATNMC rebel group. “We talked about where things had gone wrong and tried to agree on a plan and on some common objectives. We created a ruling council, a military état majeur, commanded and coordinated by Mohammed Ag Najm and other senior officers. There are about 40 of them. And we also created a political bureau, which set about analysing and considering all the political aspects including how to raise awareness among the international community, especially the regional powers.”

Past errors boiled down essentially to three areas: weakness of military strategy and material, lack of a strong intellectual and political branch and disunity. Of those three, disunity has always been the biggest problem in previous uprisings. The French conquered the Sahara by fomenting internal divisions within the old Touareg confederations, turning tribal leaders against each other and vassal clans against the nobility. The government of Mali adopted precisely the same strategy after independence in 1960. The first rebellion of 1963 was weakened by the disagreement between Intallah Ag Attaher, the current aged hereditary leader of the Kel Adagh Touareg and his brother Zeid Ag Attaher. Intallah favoured cooperation and cohabitation with Mali. Zeid favoured revolt and was eventually captured and imprisoned by Mali in their infamous jail near the remote salt mines of Taodenni.

In 1990, the MPLA splintered after the signing of the Tamanrasset accords. Iyad Ag Ghali, who belongs to the ruling Ifoghas clan of the Kel Adagh, remained as the head of the MPA, having dropped the word ‘Liberation’ from the name of his movement in order to make it more appealing to moderate Touareg and to the Malians. Many other Ifoghas leaders remained loyal to Iyad and the MPA. The ‘lower class’ Tamashek clans in the region, especially the Imghad, a subordinate ‘vassal’ clan to the Ifoghas, split from Iyad’s group and formed the Revolutionary Army for the Liberation of Azawad (ARLA), which was lead by nobles from the Taghat Mellet and Idnan clans. ARLA also represented some Iklan, or former slaves.   The Popular Liberation Front of Azawad (FPLA) were hardliners, opposed to the idea of making peace with Mali before the rebellion’s primary aims were realised. They were made up mainly of Kel Antessar Touareg from the Timbuktu region and Chamanamas from Menaka. Then there was the Armed Islamic Front of Azawad (FIAA) which was composed mainly of northern Arabs and Moors. It had a more religious character than the other rebel movements and was closely allied to Mauritania and Algeria. All these four movements were represented at one time or another by a kind of umbrella rebel organisation called the Movement of United Fronts of Azawad (MFUA).

Needless to say, all this division and splintering did nothing for the strength of the rebel movement as a whole and it quickly allowed Mali to regain control of events. Things weren’t that much better in 2006, when the ADC eventually split between a faction dominated by Ifoghas Touareg on the one hand and different factions lead by Taghat Mellet, Idnan, Imghad and Chamanamas on the other, all of whom accused the Ifoghas of hogging the limelight in the negotiations and seeking their benefit above all. Ag Bahanga’s schism and his creation of the ATNMC was an outward sign of these internal splits.

These bewildering divisions within the Touareg community pale in terms of the strife and damage caused when compared to the ethnic wars that have been unleashed by Malian policies of divide and rule. The darkest ethnic conflict in the modern history of northern Mali began in 1992 with the formation of the Patriotic Malian Movement Ganday Koy (MPMGK) or just Ganda Koy for short, a Songhoi militia that was backed and funded by the Malian army, and whose main aim seems to have been to foist terror on innocent Touareg and Arab civilians. The Ganda Koy perpetrated several massacres in the Gao and Timbuktu areas in the mid 1990s, the most famous of which was a massacre of around 60 Touareg marabout or holy men from the Kel Essouk clan in a camp near Gao in October 1994.

Is the rebel movement more united this time? The answer is yes. At least, so far. The talks in the Zakak camp allowed various concerns and age old gripes to be aired and a basic consensus to be established around a shared set of goals and an agreed division of roles and responsibilities. The political leader of the MNLA is Bilal Ag Cherif. But while the Ifoghas still hold on to their historical role as the political leaders of the Touareg in north eastern Mali, a great deal of effort has been made to spread the message and raise awareness of the MNLA and its aims among the entire population of the north, in all its various ethnic groups and across all the strata of its society, and bring people from all the different clans and factions under one umbrella. Talking to various Touareg friends in the past few months, the general sense of hope united behind the MNLA was palpable.

Having said that, there are many Touareg, especially Imghad and Kel Antessar, who are staying loyal to Mali. They include numerous Malian army officers and soldiers, as well local mayors, deputies and senior administrators. A whole group of about 300 Touareg fighters who returned from the war in Libya late last summer, lead by Colonel Waki Ag Ossad, an Imghad Touareg, made great play of their fealty to the Malian state. They were received with great fanfare by President Adama Toumani Touré at the Koulouba Palace in Bamako. “We didn’t come back to create a division between communities, and even less to divide the state,” declared Ag Ossad. “The military material that we have brought with us is there to be used by our country, which is Mali. We’ve come to contribute to and maintain peace and security in the north.”

Every rebellion eventually turns into an ethnic war

The MNLA have also made strenuous efforts to present themselves as a revolutionary movement for the liberation of ALL the peoples of Azawad – Touareg, Songhoi, Arab, Peul – and not just a Touareg rebel movement.   Azawad is the name they give to the independent state they are seeking to create, which they say will comprise the three main provinces of Northern Mali: Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu. If an independent Azawad were to exist, it would relieve Mali of more than 50% of its actual surface area. The MNLA also say they have no designs on parts of the Sahara inhabited by the Touareg that exist over the border in Niger, Algeria and Libya. They claim that there are large numbers of Arabs and Songhoi already fighting on their side. It’s true that certain important Arab leaders, such as Baba Ould Sidi Elmoctar, the hereditary chief of the influential Arab Kounta tribe, have already thrown in their lot with MNLA. As I write, there are also reports arriving from the desert that northern Arabs in the towns of Leré, Timbuktu and Goundam who are leaving to join MNLA in the field.

Whether or not MNLA can bind together all the different tribal and ethnic groups in Northern Mali until its aims are achieved is still a moot point. Even before open revolt broke out last Tuesday, there were dark mutterings about a resurgence of Ganda Koy vigilante activity. The founder of the movement, Imam Mohammed n’Tissa Maiga, made his intention to rearm and get his militia ready for the growing threat from Touareg rebels quite plain back in early December. In the past few days, reports from Gao and Timbuktu claim that the Malian army is handing out cash and arms to Songhoi men and urging them to go and attack anyone suspected of sympathy with the MNLA. The spectre of tribal war haunts the north once again. And not only reports, the houses of several prominent Touaregs in the garrison town of Kati near Timbuktu have been burned by angry mobs wielding machetes and as I right, Touareg and Arabs in Bamako, easily distinguishable by their lighter skin, as suffering attacks on their person and their property.

The private militias within the Malian army

Even more dangerous to the MNLA than the Ganda Koy are the ethnically based militias that have been fighting the Touareg alongside the Malian army since 2008.   It was during that year that the Malian high command finally realised the futility of sending raw recruits from the southern savannah regions of the country to fight Ibrahim Ag Bahanga and the ATNMC in the arid deserts of the north.   The Sahara is completely alien to most southern Malians, and soldiers from the south have never had much luck at defeating hardened Touareg fighters in their own environment.   So the Malian generals changed their strategy and invited two senior army officers from north to form and train their own militias. The first is a Touareg called El Hadj Gamou, an imghad, who seems to harbour a visceral disdain for the Ifoghas Touareg who are the historical ‘nobility’ in the Adagh des Ifoghas, the name given to the Kidal region by the French in the late 19^th century. The imghad were a subservient or ‘vassal’ clan in the old days, and many imghad Touareg favoured the more egalitarian society that Mali imposed in the north east after independence. The Touareg rebellion has its own element of internal class warfare.

Gamou is the most senior Malian army officer in the region, a feared and ruthless soldier whom the MNLA have accused of numerous human rights abuses in recent days, including torture. His militia is run like a private army which exacts retribution and submission from both professional and private enemies, by force if necessary. The other main militia fighting with the Malian army is lead by Major Colonel Abderahmane Ould Meydou, the trim and square-jawed northern Arab who has also, like Gamou managed to carve out an fearsome reputation as an able and daring desert soldier. The MNLA announced his death in action with great glee a few days after the outbreak of recent hostilities, only to emit a collective groan when Ould Meydou subsequently appeared on national TV to denounce rumours of his demise, looking fit, relaxed and debonaire.

The ranks of Ould Meydou’s Arab or ‘Berabiche’ militias were swelled just before the outbreak of hostilities on January 12^th thanks to a deal brokered by the Malian government. In return for the recruitment and training of Arab militiamen, a super-rich northern Arab businessman by the name of Mohamed Ould Aiwanatt was released from prison where he was serving a sentence for the role he played in a major drugs-trafficking operation known as Air Cocaine. This extraordinary episode involved a entire Boeing 727 stuffed full of cocaine that flew into the Sahara from Venezuela and landed in the remote desert north of a village called Tarkint. The cocaine was then unloaded into a convoy of 4×4 vehicles and disappeared eastwards into the desert, probably en route for Egypt, Turkey, the Balkans and finally Europe. The mayor of Tarkint, Baba ould Cheickh, a close advisor to the Malian President, was implicated alongside Ould Aiwanatt in this and several other major drugs scandals. Aiwanatt’s release from gaol and the hypocritical behaviour of the Malian government in their so-called war on drugs and insecurity infuriated Touareg opinion, and added more than a strand of straw to the load that eventually broke their back and drove them to war.

Gamou’s and Ould Meydou’s militias were the weapon that eventually allowed Mali to subdue Ag Bahanga’s ATNMC in January 2009. Bamako is no doubt hoping that they can do the same again to the MNLA, even though it presents a challenge of an entirely different order to Ag Bahanga’s underfunded and poorly equipped crew.

All in all, unity and disunity will be among the biggest challenges to the success of the MNLA uprising. It has always been the Touareg movement’s greatest challenge. No wonder so many desert songs by Touareg bands like Tinariwen and Tamikrest lament the lack of unity in Touareg society, and berate Touareg leaders and politicians for succumbing to tribalism and Malian games of divide and rule. Bamako plays its hand subtly and expertly when the need arises. One of the current MNLA representatives in Nouakchott, Mauritania, and senior political figure from Mali’s north east, Nina Walet Intallou explained how it works: “Mali sends someone, some senior figure in the administration, who is a relative of one of the rebels, to have a discrete word with him and bring him back to the road of peace with promises of money, favours and preferment. Then they send a minister to speak to the leaders of his clan and persuade them to follow the path of peace. That’s not negotiation.”

The Sahara’s Facebook generation

Another novelty in this uprising is the presence of a strong and very active ‘intellectual’ wing in the Touareg independence movement. By intellectual, I mean one whose main concern is policy, communication, influence, diplomacy and engagement in geo-political affairs, rather than fighting out in the bush. The lack of such a dimension has been a weakness of Touareg uprisings since the earliest days. Most rebel leaders have felt more comfortable out in the desert leading their troops than pressing the flesh in the corridors of power. When there have been political men of any worth, their work has often been hampered by a mutual mistrust between them and the military leadership. There’s an apocryphal story about Ibrahim Ag Bahanga that illustrates this lack of intellectual capacity in a damning way. During his time as a renegade in the remote Adagh des Ifoghas a few years ago, Ag Bahanga once received an envoy with an important message from the government in Bamako. The envoy handed over the sealed letter and Ag Bahanga proceeded to open it and, holding the missive upside down, pretended to read it thoughtfully. He then told the messenger that he would “think the proposal over” and sent him away.

Ag Bahanga was a man of many talents, but written correspondence and the fine arts of communication weren’t among them. He was in his element at the head of a rebel group out in remoteness of the desert bush, not in the fine gilded halls of ministries in Bamako, Tripoli, Algiers or Paris. It was often left to his father in law and spokesperson, Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed to be Ag Bahanga’s ‘voice’ on the international stage. Ag Sid’Ahmed is now the chief spokesperson of MNLA, and one of the more worldly and politically experienced men at the head of the movement. But even he recognises the need for an active and engaged ‘intellectual’ dimension to the MNLA project, and his co-revolutionaries agreed that this was a great failing in the past.

Cue the National Movement for Azawad or MNA, an organisation that was created by a group of young Touareg students and graduates in late 2010.   These well educated, internet savvy and youthful revolutionaries gathered together in Timbuktu at the end of October of that year and declared their intention to find a political, legal and peaceful route to Azawadi independence. Their discourse was non-tribal, non-ethnic, inclusive, literate and fluent. In their first declaration, issued as a press release, on November 1^st they wrote:   “Today, Azawad has become a zone of conflict fought over by countries and extremist groups who care only for their own interests. As for the Azawadis themselves, they are simply caught between the anvil and the hammer of so called terrorist groups. Azawad is now prone to all manner of regional and international interventions…in which the people of Azawad are given no role at all, except that of a useless spectator, forced to look on while the image of their homeland is ruined and its national riches plundered by governments and multi-national companies….Aware of the pain that our people have suffered for decades, as sons of the nation and defenders of a cultural identity threatened with extinction, who are merely perpetuating the struggle of the ancestors, whilst adhering to universal human values…we announce today the birth of a National Movement of Azawad (MNA).”

At the end of this inaugural meeting, two of the MNA’s leaders, Moussa Ag Acharatoumane and Boubacar Ag Fadil, were imprisoned for treasonous activities damaging to the territorial integrity of the state. They soon became Facebook heroes, a cause célèbre among the youth of the Touareg diaspora. After numerous demonstrations and petitions they were freed. Acharatoumane and his fellow revolutionaries had already set about disseminating the message of revolution among the younger demographic of the northern deserts. Their work resulted in several small demonstrations in Kidal, Menaka and Timbuktu, that occurred around the same time as the launch of the MNA.   These events marked the emergence of the Sahara’s own Facebook generation, one acutely conscious of its role models in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and elsewhere, and energised by the idea of flexing its own people power.   The MNA soon set up a functioning and well maintained website as well as a very active Facebook forum and an online newspaper called Toumast Press, which features well written and well argued, although admittedly partial, articles about the current situation in the desert.   Apart from anything else, this new generation is less encumbered by the divisions, the compromises and the defeats of the past. They are free of the cynicism that is born out of defeat. Their horizon is straight, clear and blue and nothing less than victory will satisfy them.

As soon as hostilities commenced on January 17^th, a continuous flow of communiqués and updates by Ag Acharatoumane, Ag Sid’Ahmed and other MNLA spokespersons started to be posted up on the web and circulated via online social networks. This energetic PR was in stark contrast to the almost complete lack of communication by the ADC in the first few days of the uprisings in May 2006, a void which allowed all kind of crazy assumptions and claims to be made by the Malian army and circulated without hindrance by the international press. The propaganda war is a great deal more involved this time round, and the two sides are more evenly matched.

The MNLA – a better balanced and muli-faceted movement

With the inclusion of the ‘internet generation’ rebels in the MNA, the MNLA has achieved a better balance than previous rebel movements. “It’s important to define who is who in this movement so that there’s no blurring of boundaries with other agendas and issues,” says MNLA spokesperson Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed. “Mohammed Ag Najm has come back from Libya with officers and men. There are also those who have deserted from the Malian army, more than six senior army officers. There were fighters who were with Ibrahim Ag Bahanga in the ATNMC. And then there was this new elite from the younger Touareg generation, who were very present on the ground and who had done some very good work raising awareness among the population of the Azawad.”

Alongside this new composition of the rank and file, there have been changes in the rebel movement’s leadership, and with that, a change in its all important relationships and ties to Algeria and Libya.   Iyad Ag Ghali is no longer the boss, and the crust of compromise that has adhered to his name ever since the national pact of 1992, his less than crystal ties with the Malian government and Algerian governments and military intelligence services, with Libya and others, has been chipped away and discarded by the new movement.   This is a crucial development. All previous uprisings were successfully manipulated, or ‘defused’ depending on your point of view, by Algeria and Libya. The fact that both countries have also been accused of being the instigators and supporters of these same uprisings demonstrates the mind boggling complexity of southern Saharan politics.

A different relationship with Libya and Algeria

The prospect of Touareg autonomy in northern Mali has never been attractive to either Libya or Algeria. In fact, all the nations in the region have always viewed the idea of independent Azawad with absolute horror. Both Algiers and Tripoli have always known that at the first sign of a truly successful Touareg uprising in Mali, their own Touareg populations in the south would inevitably begin to harbour up some very uncomfortable notions of their own potential autonomy. But the threat doesn’t end there. Ever since the outbreak of hostilities, the various disgruntled Berber populations of Algeria and Libya have been voicing their unbridled support for the MNLA and their delight at the prospect of fellow Berbers (the Kel Tamashek are a branch of the wider Imazighen family) giving a culturally oppressive regime a bloody nose. The most in depth interview accorded to any MNLA representative yet has been the one that spokesperson Mossa Ag Attaher gave to the Berber website www.tamazgha.fr   The messages of support from Berber secessionist organisations such as the Movement for an Autonomous Kabylia (MAK) or World Amazigh Congress (CMA) have been effusive.

Ghadafi is no longer around to muddy the waters on behalf of Libya, and the NTC have too many problems of their own to take a very active part in what’s happening in northern Mali. That leaves Algeria. When the MNLA tried to capture the northern town of Tessalit on January 20^th, they learned that there were a number of Algerian army trainers and special ops personnel in the nearby Malian army camp at Amachache. The MNLA commander gave them 24 hours to leave, but rather than obeying, the Algerians proceeded to send more soldiers to Amachache and resupply the base. Far from instigating this rebellion, or supporting it, or even manoeuvring into their usual position as peace brokers, it seems that Algeria has thrown it’s lot in with the Malian government against the rebels. The truth is that Algeria has been excluded from the action this time round and so it has decided to play hard and show its true colours by supporting Mali in an attempt to make sure that an independent Azawad never sees the light of day.

“Since 1963, the attitude of Algeria has always been that if Mali gives autonomy to the Touareg of Azawad, they’ll also have problems with their Touareg,” agrees Nina Walet Intallou. “In reality, they’ve always wanted to take over this region. They see it as part of Algeria. When you think that there was the Algerian consulate in Gao that would give Algerian nationality to anyone who asked for it, from Kidal or anywhere, that’s proof. But it isn’t Algeria or Libya that will intervene this time round. From now on, we will only address our problems to the United Nations and the European Community.”

The fact that Algeria has been excluded from the party is possibly linked to the recent fall from grace of Iyad Ag Ghali. “When we created the MNLA there were many of us who said that Ibrahim Ag Bahanga had been too manipulated by Iyad,” a senior MNLA political figure explained to me. “The condition that people gave before putting their confidence in Ag Bahanga and his people was that he detach himself from Iyad, because of all the mistakes that Iyad made in the past. Iyad was totally in favour of the Tamanrasset accords [of 1991] but once they were signed, he never spoke about them again. He never opened his mouth to denounce what happened afterwards, even though he was supposed to be the leader of the entire Touareg movement. In creating the MNLA, we wanted new people in charge, who had serious objectives, and not people who would drag us between Mali and Algeria.”

The sidelining of Iyad Ag Ghali and his islamist vision

The story goes that Iyad Ag Ghali came to the meetings at the Zakak base in October, and put himself forward as a candidate for the post of Secretary General of the MNLA. However, his candidacy was rejected, due to his past silences and obscure dealings with the governments of Mali and Algeria. Instead, the post was filled by Bilal Ag Acherif, a cousin of Ibrahim Ag Bahanga. There was an overwhelming sense that this time round the movement needed fresh thinking at the top, independent of Algerian, Malian or Libyan meddling and that all the half measures of the past, the broken treaties brokered by one or other of the regional powers, the compromises and the stalling had to stop. This time, it was full independence or nothing.

After being turned down the MNLA leadership at Zakak, Iyad Ag Ghali also presented himself to an important meeting of the leaders of the Ifoghas clan, to which he belongs, in Abeibara north of Kidal. There he proposed that he become the political head of the clan and be allowed to pursue an Islamist vision of an independent Azawad. Once again his candidature was rejected, and instead Alghabass Ag Intallah as chosen as the new political leader of the Ifoghas, in place of his ageing and infirm father, the amenokal or leader of the Ifoghas, Intallah Ag Attaher, who almost fifty years ago threw his lot in with Mali and opposed the rebellion lead by his brother Zeid.

At the end of the great rebellion of the 1990s, Ag Ghali became increasingly religious and ‘spiritual’ in his outlook, growing a huge and venerable beard in the process. He was attracted to the teachings of Pakistani preachers belonging to the huge worldwide Muslim proselytising organisation, the Tablighi Jama’at, who were present in Kidal in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Tablighi Jama’at is over years eighty old, has over 20 million members world wide, and does not preach violent jihadism.   In fact, if anything, its approach is largely pacifist and spiritual. Ag Ghali and other Touareg seemed moved by the urgent call of these foreign preachers for a return to the core values of Islam, and Ag Ghali even travelled to Tablighi Jama’at’s headquarters in Raiwind, Pakistan, to learn more. He later spent time studying at the mosque in St Denis, in the northern suburbs of Paris.   Many, if not most of Iyad Ag Ghali’s fellow Malian Touaregs however either steered clear of Tablighi Jama’at or took a vague or merely temporary interest in them before finally deciding that they preferred to stick with the more tolerant and ‘Berber’ form of Islam which Touareg have long been known to espouse. The Pakistani preachers ended up getting into trouble with the authorities in Kidal and Gao, becoming mixed up with local politics and electioneering, and finally being politely but firmly asked to leave the region.

Ag Ghali however continued on his religiously inspired path, whilst still holding down the jobs of rebel in chief and general high level fixer. He played a central role in the negotiations for the release of 32 Swiss, German and Dutch hostages from the grip of a GSPC katiba lead by the shady Algerian emir Aderrazak ‘Le Para’ in 2003. This first close contact with the terrorist group that would eventually become Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has left a penumbra of doubt and suspicion around Iyad’s name that has spawned all kinds of theories, of varying degrees of implausibility, about enduring connections and even collaboration between Iyad and Islamic terrorists or Iyad and the Algerian secret services, the DRS. None of these theories has ever been proven beyond doubt. However, when Iyad was sent to be a consular advisor at the Malian consul in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2007, following the 2006 uprising which he essentially lead, he reportedly got himself into deep water by associating with proscribed extremist figures or groups. He was eventually expelled from the country and flown to Paris, before returning to Kidal.

Iyad’s talk of the benefits of sharia law for the Touareg nation went down badly at the Abeibara meeting. One female delegate told him that he had a long road to travel before his fundamentalist dreams of a sharia state became true, as he would first have to climb over the bodies of all the dead women of Azawad, not to mention those of the dead men. His ideas were simply unacceptable. Iyad then declared that if that was the decision of the assembled Ifoghas leaders, then he would go off and form his own movement. This he promptly did, calling his new organisation Ansar Eddine. He declaired its main aim would be to install sharia law in the Adagh and rehabilitate the primacy of the ulema, the council of religious elders.

Iyad Ag Ghali, Ansar Eddine and Mali-AQIM collusion theory.

Iyad’s creation of Ansar Eddine and his reported ties with a certain Abou Abdelkarim aka ‘Le Targui’, one of the minor AQIM leaders operating in the southern desert, have opened the flood gates to national and international speculation about the possible links between the Touareg rebel movement and Islamic terrorists, a link that the Malian government is all to keen to stoke and publicise in order to discredit the movement. As his name indicates, Abdelkarim le Targui is supposedly a Touareg, a native of the Tinzawaten region and the erstwhile preacher at the mosque in In Khalil, a remote and fairly lawless border town in the far north east of Mali. He is reportedly a subordinate of the thuggish emir Abou Zeid, and leader of his own small katiba called ‘Al Ansar’ which was responsible for kidnapping the septuagenarian French humanitarian worker Michel Germaneau in 2010.   According to an announcement by Abdelmalik Droukdel, until recently the supreme leader of AQIM, which was posted up on the AQIM website, Abdelkarim Le Targui was also responsible for murdering Germaneau in cold blood as well as negotiation major drug deals on behalf of AQIM with the representatives of a Colombian drugs cartel in Guinée Bissau. Not the kind of person you should be associating with if you want to present yourself as a legitimate political organisation.

Iyad’s association with Abdelkarim Le Targui is vague and conjectural. Some Touareg even argue that far from being a true targui, Abdelkarim is an Algerian Arab, like all the other AQIM leaders in the southern desert.   Nonetheless this link, together with the perceived religious extremism of Iyad and his Ansar Eddine movement, has spawned a smear campaign in Bamako which aims to convince the world that the MNLA are in cahoots with AQIM.   The AFP reporter in Bamako even claimed that Abou Zeid took part in a recent MNLA attack on the army in the village of Aguel’hoc north of Kidal. Nothing is more poisonous to the international image of the Touareg cause than this taint of fundamentalism and AQIM, not even the Ghadafi links.

There are several reasons why that taint is wholly unjustified. The first is that since the inception of the MNA and MNLA movements, one of their loudest, most cherished and oft repeated aims is to rid their homeland of AQIM, an organisation which they consider to be one of Mali’s most effective weapons in its fight against their cause. “AQIM was parachuted in and installed in our territory by the Malian government,” declares Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed, with total conviction. “It was the initiative of certain drugs barons, who are advisors to the President, in the shadows of the Koulouba Palace [The Presidential palace in Bamako]. They brought them into the Timbuktu region and then to Kidal. In return for the release of the 32 hostages in 2003, a pact of non-aggression was signed between Bamako and Al Qaeda, who then progressively occupied this territory. Those contacts became permanent and it’s clear that since then all the operations lead by the terrorist groups have originated in Mali, and the terrorist have always fallen back to Mali. It’s their safe haven. Everyone knows that the terrorists are in communication with military leaders, and that politicians from Bamako meet the terrorist emirs quite regularly.”

Far fetched? Maybe. Like Professor Jeremy Keenan’s controversial theory that AQIM are a creation of the Algerian DRS, the Mali-AQIM collusion theory remains conjectural. But the circumstantial evidence that links a cabal of Malian army and secret service operatives, usually Arabs from the north of the country close to the upper echelons of Mali’s political and military hierarchy, to the huge drug smuggling operations that have blighted the stability of the northern deserts in recent years and to AQIM is very strong. It’s hardly a secret anymore that a consensus exists among US, French and Algerian diplomats in the region that Mali has been long on words but short on action in its dealings with AQIM since 2006. The frustration with Mali’s lack of firm resolve and decisive action in this regard, despite the millions of dollars in aid that it has received from the US and France specifically for the purpose of fighting terrorists on its soil, has been growing exponentially in the embassies and foreign ministries of the world powers. Apart from one clash with AQIM in the desert north of Timbuktu back in 2006, there have hardly been any confirmed reports of the Malian army doing any damage to AQIM at all. In fact, the most determined opposition that AQIM has encountered during its five year campaign of terror in Mali has been at the hands of the ADC, the Touareg rebel movement launched in 2006, who skirmished with the terrorists several times between 2006 and 2009, with lives lost on both sides. And now that the entire might of the Malian army has been thrown against the Touareg uprising with such devastating force, including fighter jets, tanks, armoured vehicles, missiles of every stamp and thousands of troops, its little wonder that Touaregs, diplomats, analysits and commentators are feeling a tad cynical about Mali’s repeated assertions in recent years that they’ve never had the military wherewithal to deal with the AQIM threat.

A senior Malian politician once had the temerity to declare in a private meeting at the US Embassy in Bamako that the presence of AQIM in the north east of the country was a good thing, as long as it meant that the Touareg rebel movement wasted its resources and time trying to combat it. At another meeting, the new Algerian ambassador informed his US counterpart that he suspected collusion between Mali and the terrorists. He cited the then recent case of a joint Algerian-Malian operation to attack an AQIM base that had failed because the AQIM katiba in question had been tipped off in advance. All these frankly startling revelations are contained in the US Embassy cables leaked by Wikileaks. In fact, there is no better way to understand what really went on in the northern deserts of Mali between 2006 and early 2010 than to read those US Embassy cables. The level of intel, of analysis and research contained in them is often of the highest order.   And yes, they do reveal that the US Embassy has also suspected Mali of at best tolerating and at worst colluding with AQIM at one time or another.

If the implantation of AQIM on Touareg soil was part of a deliberate Malian strategy, then it has been extraordinarily effective. The main campaign of AQIM kidnapping and extortion began in March 2008 (interestingly there had been a five year hiatus since the 2003 hostage incident), just when relations between Mali, the ADC and Ag Bahanga were reaching their nadir. Since that time AQIM has knocked the Touareg rebellion squarely off the front page, both national and internationally. Until January 17^th last that is. The presence of AQIM in Mali put the country in the front line of the USA’s global war on terror, giving it kudos and a receptive ear in Washington whilst justifying the huge amounts of money, training and equipment that America lavished on Mali in the context of its Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Programme (TSCTP) and Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI). It has also emptied the north of foreign journalists, foreign observers, foreign NGO workers, foreign tourists and foreigners in general, whose presence could have been inconvenient for certain shady army or secret service (DGSE) operations, especially those linked with the drug trade.   Most of all, AQIM have simply throttled the region and deprived its Touareg population of any hope of building a viable future and developing a strong economy. In short, AQIM has crippled Touareg society in Mali’s north east. No wonder MNLA have vowed to rid their land of Al Qaeda.

And yet Iyad Ag Ghali’s Ansar Eddine movement continues to sow the seeds of doubt and Mali’s propaganda machine continues to milk any possible connection between the MNLA, Iyad and AQIM for all its worth. Apparently Iyad tried to sell his plan for an Islamic inspired movement to the Ifoghas meeting in Abeibara by promising that his political approach would be no different to that of the moderate Islamic parties that have come to power following the Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. There also happens to be another Islamic organisation in Mali with the name Ansar Dine. It has a vast following amongst southern Malians, who flock to football stadiums in their thousands to hear the preachings of the movement’s leader, Cherif Ousmane Madani Haidara. Ansar Dine preaches tolerance, democracy and social morality inspired by faith in the teachings of The Prophet. It is also an ardent critic of government corruption and incompetence. Perhaps Iyad sees his movement as a Tamashek off shoot of the bigger Ansar Dine. Who knows. “What’s very important is that all the religious leaders of the Adagh des Iforas have categorically rejected this foreign Salafist culture that has been planted in their midst,” Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed declares with emphasis. “I know that Iyad is an important person in the region and I know that he’s involved in religious matters. But I can not believe that he would completely abandon the tolerance that is part of our Touareg culture. Not for one second. Maybe Iyad and others realise that AQIM has a hold on some of our young people, and they’re trying to present a different message about Islam that might possibly win back all those that the Salafists have co-opted into their ranks.”

Why rebel?

Two questions remain to be answered. Why rebel now? And why rebel at all? The latter question often perplexes curious outsiders. What, they wonder, do the Touareg people have against Mali, a country which, on the face of it, seems relatively friendly, peaceful and tolerant. It is after all one of the better functioning and more stable democracies in Africa. It is renowned for its culture, its ancient sites of religious devotion and learning, and for its musicians, who are better known outside Africa than any of its political leaders.   Mali has many fans throughout the world, justifiably so. What makes the Touareg so determined to wreak tear this country apart and wreak havoc on its population?

“Our inclusion in the country was a mistake,” is Nina Walet Intallou’s blunt answer to that question. “In the beginning, just before the end of colonisation, a letter was written by some desert leaders to General De Gaulle pleading with him to let the Touareg and other ethnicities create their own state in the middle of the Sahara. Only four tribal chiefs signed it, but there was never really any proper explanation given by the French to the Touareg, telling them “Listen, we’re going to leave you and your homeland will just be sliced up into four or five parts and given to different countries [Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso]. You will be given to Mali.” We had never been colonised by Mali before. It was something quite brutal and at the time there weren’t any intellectuals who could measure the consequences of it all. The leaders didn’t realise that the south of Mali would come and occupy their territory. They thought that they would remain masters of their own country in an independent Africa. When they saw the people of the south who came and said,”Now, you’re under our authority,” they were completely perplexed.”

That’s the original sin, that duplicitous betrayal of the Touareg and their ‘colonisation’ by Mali at independence. It has been entrenched and deepened by war, oppression, drought, corruption, exile, marginalisation and a painful chain of cause and effect, tit for tat, hurt and vengeance, ever since. But in the end, it all boils down to that original ‘mistake’. All attempts to convince the Touareg as a whole that they are and should remain proud citizens of Mali have, by and large, failed. Not for all, but for most. Apart from religion, the cultural and social bonds that tie the Touareg to Malians from the south are just too weak to make the idea of belonging this nation called Mali acceptable in the northern deserts. And it’s the same vice versa. To most southern Malians, the Sahara is another place and a generally fearful one at that. For a southern soldier from Sikasso or Kati, being sent up north to patrol the open desert is akin to a Muscovite being sent to Siberia in the 19^th century.   It’s another world.

Nonetheless there are Touaregs, a large number in fact, and even more Arabs and Songhoi, who do see their future within the current borders of the Malian state. Those people have in a sense made their peace with the idea that Mali is one nation that can include all its diverse peoples. They argue that development is more important than nationalism or ethnic separatism. Mali has always emphasized the idea of inclusivity, of a state that would treat all its citizens, black, white, Muslim, animist, northern, southern, with equanimity. It sees the Touareg propensity to rebel as an act of downright ingratitude, emphasising the special treatment the north east has received in terms of investment and political freedom, compared to other parts of the country, ever since 1992. The north may be poor, but Mali as a whole is poor, so what are the Touareg complaining about.

Most Malians in the south resent the idea of their country being split in two. They point out that the ‘white’ Touareg and Arabs aren’t the only ethnicities in the north. There are also Songhoi, Peul, Bozo, who are black like them.   Why should they be forced to secede and become part of this Azawad? It’s a pertinent question, that the intellectual wing of the MNLA are trying hard to answer with their claims that Azawad will be for ALL the people of the north, not only the Touareg.   And of course, most Malians realise that under those northern deserts there are immense deposits of oil, uranium, gold and phosphates that could one day make their nation rich. They are loathed to give up on that enticing prospect.

Nonetheless, the Touareg who are fighting the Malian army have no doubt in their minds that theirs is a just cause, that their land and freedom and dignity were taken from them by subterfuge in 1960 and that they have been duped ever since into accepting their unhappy state. No longer. The father of the military leader of MNLA, Mohammed Ag Najm, was killed by the Malian army during the first ever uprising in 1963. Make no mistake, this is not a storm in a tea cup involving a few disgruntled returnees from the Libyan war, or a few irate drug dealers and traffickers settling scores, it’s battle driven by dreams of a better future, although tainted in a small way, no doubt, as is the way of the world, by other motivations like vengeance and gain. Whether those dreams are justified or not is debatable, but they are real.

Why rebel now?

In December, before the outbreak of hostilities, a revealing essay entitled ‘Azawad, it’s now or never’ appeared on the Toumast Press website. Written by Ahmeyede Ag Ilkamassene, it outlined the apparently favourable geo-political climate for the Azawad cause that existed at the end of 2011, citing the independence of South Sudan and Eritrea as examples of mistakes made at the time of decolonisation that had been rectified and which therefore proved that the idea of an independent Azawad wasn’t just pie in the sky. It pointed out that the structures that had dominated global politics since the second world war were changing, that new powers like China, Russia, Brazil and India were coming to the fore and that these powers were more open to the idea of the post-colonial settlement in African being dismantled and rebuilt.

Ag Ilkamassene also proudly stated that, this time, the Touareg revolutionaries were prepared for battle. They would not be hampered by the syndrome of the rusty canon that refused to fire on French forces during the capture of Agadez in 1916, thereby ensuring the defeat of an uprising lead by the first great Touareg independence fighter, Kaocene Ag Gedda. This time the dreams of Kaocene, Zeid Ag Attaher and Mohammed Ali Ag Attaher could come true.   Another inspiration was the Arab spring, which had been closely followed throughout the southern Sahara. “For the first time in the history of humanity,” writes Ag Ilkamessene, “revolutions are occurring simultaneously at all four points of the compass.”

The essay defined a zeitgeist that, claimed Ag Ilkamessene, was propitious for the decisive move. Then there were the local realities on the ground in Northern Mali, the opportunities not to be missed, such as the arrival of the Libyan contingent with their arms. The MNLA also cite the fact that the Malian government had been progressively rebuilding and reequipping its military infrastructure in the north east since early autumn 2011, using money that was supposed to be spent on economic and social development in the region, or fighting Al Qaida. Add to that the recruiting of Arabs for Ould Meydou’s militias, and the rumours that the Ganda Koy were getting ready to re-arm, and that feeling of ‘It’s now or never’ became overwhelming.

Hama Ag Sid’Ahmed puts the outbreak of war down to the repeated refusal of the Malian government to negotiate seriously with the MNLA, or even to give it any official recognition. ”We called on the the government of Bamako to take the difficult situation in the region seriously on several occasions,” he says. “Bamako’s response was simply that the situation didn’t exist. They thought any problems were under control or if not, they could be solved by trickery. We told them to be careful, because the problem exists and it’s serious. There’s permanent insecurity in the region, and terrorism too. We can’t live with that.”

In late November, Bamako sent a delegation of National Assembly deputies to the desert north of Kidal to go and meet with the Touareg soldiers who had returned from Libya. The Malian newspaper L’Essor recently published a fascinating eye-witness account of these meetings out in the open bush, which ultimately ended in failure. The delegation of eminent senior northerners found it hard to listen to the demands and discourse of the relatively young secretary general of the MNLA, Bilal Ag Cherif. Age is very highly respected and deferred to in Touareg society. But apparently not this time. “You speak in the name of Azawad when you don’t even know what it is,” retorted an angry deputy after Ag Cherif had spoken. “We deputies have been elected and we are natives of this region. You’re demanding something in the name of the inhabitants of the north without having any mandate from them. Where is your legitimacy?”

Then, on January 7^th, Bamako sent Mohammed Ag Erlaf, a former Touareg rebel and a senior bureaucrat in the Malian administration, who for the past few years has been managing a huge project called The Special Programme for Peace, Security and the Development of Northern Mali (PSPSDN), to talk to the MNLA leadership. He outlined a set of promises that sounded uncannily like those Mali had already made in 1992 and 2006. They included a special offer aimed directly at Iyad Ag Ghali to create a new post of cadi, or Muslim judge, for each administrative region of the north, and of an imam for every major mosque. The Touareg rebel leadership were tired of such approaches and they resented way in which Ag Erlaf tried to separate one leader from another by promising each special favours. It smacked, once again, of that old divide and rule policy.

So that was that. The time for talking had come to an end. The dice were cast. Ag Najm and his troops set off for Menaka.

Postscript – The dirty war

Today, as I write, the rebellion has entered its second week. The MNLA have attacked the towns of Lere and Niafunké in the west of Mali, reaching further beyond MNLA’s northeastern heartlands than any other rebel movement since 1990. Instead of attacking a town and then immediately disappearing off to the hills, the MNLA are trying to hold on to their gains, and extend their reach, thereby over-stretching the under-paid and often demoralised Malian troops to their limit. News from the desert is scanty, and objective verifiable news is almost non-existant. However, as predicted, it does seem that the MNLA are giving the Malian army the kind of challenge that the north of Mali hasn’t seen in twenty years, if ever. Nevertheless, it’s hard to conceive how this mitigated military success will ever translate into the birth of an independent Azawad. The pressures against that ever happening, both from within Mali and, more importantly, from all the nation states of West Africa and Maghreb, and the global powers, is just too strong. But MNLA believe it can be done. Only time will tell.

What’s certain, and what was also predictable, is that this conflict is also fast degenerating into a dirty ethnic war, pitting Bamana, Manding, Songhai and Peul against Touareg and Arab. There are reports of burning and looting and machete attacks on northerners living in the south. Unconfirmed, as always, but the direction of events seems clear. Whatever happens, the loser will inevitably be that unity, that fraternal bond between peoples and cultures, that Malians have cherished for so long.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2012

First published in Think Africa Press – Feb 2012

The post THE CAUSES OF THE TOUAREG UPRISING OF JAN 2012 – The 4th roll of the Tamashek Dice appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Ibrahim ag Alhabib on stage at the Highline Ballroom, New York, July 2011. (c) Andy Morgan

PHOTO ESSAY – Tinariwen in New York, July 2011

All was quiet in room 509 when I turned up with my bottle of Jura whiskey. Tinariwen’s sound engineer Jaja was watching a vampire movie on TV. Elaga, their rhythm guitarist, was sitting at a small darkly varnished table eating pasta from a Styrofoam carton. Said the percussionist was lying on his bed, delving through the archive of photos and recordings on his LG mobile, keeping his own counsel as he usually does.

As I entered I saw Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Tinariwen’s iconic founder and frontman, standing by the window. He looked better than he had done that morning, when the back pain that had been plaguing him on the overnight flight from Seattle, depriving him of sleep or comfort, gave him the aura of a hungry ghost. His hair was still standing crazy in a 240-degree arc around his head; grey-black, wild, electrocuted. His features were still creased and haggard, with those small round eyes staring out in a half-daze. But at least he was walking around now and engaging a little in what was going on. I told him I’d bought him a present and he thanked me with a mumble, a wan smile and averted eyes. I stepped into the bathroom to have a smoke out of the window, looking down into one of New York’s countless dark back alleys with its morbid machine-like hum.

Emerging from the bathroom I sat down at the table and poured myself a shot of whiskey. Ibrahim remarked that this whiskey didn’t taste like the others. I agreed, explaining that it came from an island called Jura, just like the name on the bottle. I launched into an enthusiastic eulogy of Scotland’s west coast; the rain, the raw beauty, the glassy sea, the islands floating off into the horizon. Ibrahim told me that he liked rain. It didn’t bother him at all.

“And there are whales,” I continued, “Do you know about whales?” I had a distinct feeling that I was bothering him with my insistent questioning but the whiskey made me talkative so I just blustered on. Ibrahim sat looking at me with his tired grave eyes and said, “the ones that jump out of the water?” He made a snaky jumping motion with his hands. I didn’t feel like explaining the difference between dolphins and whales and so I just answered, “Yes.”

We sat in silence for a while. Ibrahim’s head was propped on his hand and his eyes stared into the middle distance; infinitely sad detached eyes with their look of disconnected longing. Was his mind in that Saharan desert home of his, so far away? Or with his boy Haroun, who died recently from some unexplained illness? I couldn’t tell. I tried to imagine such a tragedy happening in my own life, and the thought alone was unbearable. The reality lurked in some incomprehensible place just beyond the frontiers of my imagination.

Ibrahim had been there. And now here he was in New York with his melancholy untamable presence. Malian soldiers, Algerian policemen and Libyan army sergeants have all tried to tame him by force. But even though they have all failed, theirs was perhaps the easier challenge. There are those of us who have tried to tame him with our friendship, our banter, our small talk or our love. We’re on a fool’s errand. I’ve learned, slowly and patiently, that one the kindest, gentlest men alive lives behind that gaunt and grave exterior. Being with Ibrahim is a lesson in simplicity and friendship stripped bare of possession or advantage. But don’t expect him to be your pal and to indulge you like an old mate. If you do, he’ll evade you like a jackal in the night.

I upbraided myself for attempting to analyze and comprehend this man. “He’s just a bloke,” I repeated to myself silently and unconvincingly, “who’s in pain and tired and a little melancholy.”

He asked after my son Alfie. “He must be big now,” he mused in his quiet croak. I answered kindly, yet awkwardly. Then I managed to get to my feet and announce that I was off back to my hotel and bed. I said goodnight and Ibrahim answered, “goodnight Andy.” As I reached the door of the hotel room and opened it, Ibrahim called out again, “Andy?” I turned round and looked at him. “Goodnight. See you tomorrow,” he said, looking straight at me. That final parting was touching and unexpected. It was as if Ibrahim was saying, “Sorry I couldn’t really talk to you, but I’m glad you’re here. Forgive me. That’s how I am.”

As I passed from the cool air-conditioned hotel lobby into the sweltering soup of the New York night, the city hit me with its monstrous clammy roar. It was like a machine with a trillion cylinders that had passed breaking point long ago, but somehow managed to roar on regardless. Anyone from a quiet peripheral part of the world might possibly bear this Nuyorican assault in the cool of autumn or winter. But now, in this summer month of record-breaking heat, the atmosphere was pulverizing, suffocating. Walking down Park Avenue in a jet-lagged sweat, I was seized by sudden panic. The dense swelter, the inhuman throb tightened around my chest like some instrument of torture. I felt like I was about to faint but a kind-hearted troop sergeant in my head took control, calmed me down, and urged me on. I reached my hotel and read Maugham with intense captivation. The noises of the New York night outside my window were savage – sirens, horns, engines, air-con, generators, beeping, honking, whistling, cooing, groaning, blasting, roaring. I sank into sleep while an intense argument brewed up on the sidewalk outside my window. “You fucking punk you fuck punk racist arsehole…!!!” And so on. Happy New York slumbers.

This was supposed to be a promo trip occasioned by the release of Tinariwen’s new album ‘Tassili’. But it didn’t feel like a routine junket. I managed Tinariwen for six years until I gave up showbiz to concentrate on writing full time eighteen months ago. I hadn’t seen them for a year. Driving from JFK through the bad dream of the Bronx, the alphabet soup shop-signs of Harlem, a place which reminds me so much of Tottenham in north east London, and the canyons of mid-town Manhattan, I contemplated the philosophical dilemma that this sky-lacerating city, full of what the poet Lorca called “geometry and anguish” presented to people like Ibrahim, for whom peace and solitude are as essential as food and air.

Not that New York can phaze Tinariwen any more. After all, it’s their sixth or maybe their seventh visit to the city. I’ve lost count and so have they. They’ve been touring the world for ten years now, taking their dusty skeletal guitar licks to the four points of the compass, spreading the gospel of a people who still cling against all odds to a desert which others are content to call a good for nothing wasteland. For them, the Sahara their home, their soul, the source of their pride and their inspiration.

Five CD albums, starting with ‘The Radio Tisdas Sessions’ back in 2001, and ending with ‘Tassili’, which was released last August, have earned Tinariwen an enviable global reputation, built on a bedrock of raw guitar, pentatonic melodies and rolling rhythms. Tinariwen’s unique sound feels part of the mythology and archaeology of the blues and rock’n’roll, but in fact it was born it its own space, and developed according to its own rules, out in the isolation of the southern Sahara during the 1970s and 1980s. The music itself has been given an almost fantastical allure by the myths and stories surrounding the band, the real McCoy rebels, born in tents out in the desert, trained in Libyan camps in the 1980s, who once strode into battle against the Malian army with a Kalashnikov on one shoulder and a guitar on another. The truth of course is subtler, deeper and infinitely more fascinating. But music and myth have seduced fans the world over, including an ever-growing list of star rockers that includes Robert Plant, Tom Yorke, Mick Jones, the Animal Collective, Metallica, Flea, Santana and the Henry Rollins.

Most of these names mean little to Ibrahim or the rest of the band. It’s not that they feel superior or indifferent to their fellow musicians’ praise, it’s just they haven’t heard of most of them. For Tinariwen, as for the Touareg in general throughout most of their troubled modern history, isolation has been both a blessing and a curse. They can’t reel of the names of tracks on ‘Exile On Main Steet’ or ‘Led Zeppelin IV’ but I’m certain that if Ibrahim had been living in Paris, London, or New York, during the past meteoric decade, he would have succumbed to the pressure long ago.

In fact, Ibrahim recently left the tiny village of Tessalit in northeastern Mali to go and live in the surrounding countryside, in the valley of the oued Affara, very close to where he was born fifty-one years ago. There he helps to tend his animals, mostly goats, and grow vegetables. His good friend Kay Kay lives nearby. Both Ibrahim and Kay Kay are old ishumar, the name given to the young Touareg who left their homes in the southern Sahara in the sixties, seventies and eighties and went into exile in Algeria and Libya to seek their fortune and join the rebel movement. In the early 1990s they fought an armed rebellion against the central governments of Mali and Niger, to reclaim ownership and governance of their ancestral lands, to defend their language and their culture and to fight for the right to live by their own ancient laws in the way their fathers and forefathers had done for centuries. That’s a pretty way of putting it I admit but it covers the essentials. The reality of the Touareg struggle is complex and testing and the fight is still very much alive today.

Nowadays, Ibrahim, Kay Kay and many other members of their generation seek the peace of their own gardens and herds in the vast Saharan landscape. I’ve been to oued Affara and the undisturbed quiet and solitude of the place is so deep and pervasive you can almost touch it.

In the last couple of years, the Sahara has been cursed by new demons: mafia kidnapping and extortion masquerading as Islamic fundamentalism, drug and people smuggling, profligate corruption and exploitation of mineral resources. It’s been put about that Tinariwen were forced to decamp from their home in Mali and travel about six hundred miles north eastwards to the region of Tassili in southern Algeria, near the town of Djanet, to record their new album because the presence of an Islamic fundamentalist militia affiliated to AQMI (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) between Tessalit and Kidal, the capital of the far northeast of Mali, made it too dangerous for foreigners to visit that area.

Ibrahim attributes the decision to other reasons entirely. “I know the Djanet region very well and it’s a very peaceful place,” he says. “It’s not like at home in Tessalit where even if you go off somewhere, your friends will follow your tracks and find you. I spent lots of time in Djanet, going there as an ishumar. We always had to hide because we had no papers and we were looking for work. I remember lots of things, things that were hard. It was an adventure you know…”

Hard up against the Libyan border, Djanet was a crossroads for migrating Touareg men during the 1980s. It was the first place where they had any hope of getting news of home, after months, maybe even years, working clandestino in Libya. Ibrahim had originally intended to record the new album with Mohammed Ag Itlale aka ‘Japonais’, an erstwhile ishumar brother-in-arms, member of Tinariwen and poet of great renown, who now lives in Kidal. But Japonais has his own demons to fight and wasn’t available for the recording, so Ibrahim went off to Djanet with five members of Tinariwen, determined to nail down the simple sound and poetry of ishumar adventurerssitting around a campfire, sharing cigarettes, stories, songs and a guitar. This had always been the context in which Tinariwen’s music was heard before they added bass and percussion and went global. It’s bottled to perfection on ‘Tassili’.

A few days later Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe from the New York band TV On The Radio arrived at Djanet airport. They were picked up in a Toyota 4×4 Landcruiser by Eyadou Ag Leche, Tinariwen’s bassist and driven through the Saharan night to the campsite / bush recording studio. Eyadou played havoc with his guests’ nerves by travelling down the un-surfaced desert tracks without any headlights on, an experience akin to riding a bucking bronco in pitch darkness at 70 miles per hour. Then, the next morning, Kyp and Tunde awoke in the epic splendor of the Saharan and it fairly robbed them of their breath. Nothing surprising there. The desert has the same effect on almost everyone who wakes up in its bitter cold dawn, or goes to sleep under its million glittering stars.

One of Ibrahim’s greatest pleasures is showing off his beloved desert home to strangers so having TV On The Radio around for the recording was a pleasure. “Everything came naturally,” he told me enthusiastically. “When I found a tune or a pattern on the guitar, Kyp would find something that went with it. Or if he found something, Eyadou just followed him. It was great. They became friends very quickly. We didn’t even have to talk that much.”

Words carry a long way in the deep hush of Ibrahim’s desert valley. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why he doesn’t use them that much. On this visit to New York, his tortuous back pain prevented him from venturing out much, except to fulfill band obligations, but he still could feel the city’s crush and frenzy. I reminded him that he once spoke to me about arriving at Paris Orly airport for the first time ten years ago and the general impression of fatigue and exhaustion that his first glimpses of western ‘civilization’ left with him. I asked him how the atmosphere of New York compared. “Well, I’ve understood many things,” he answers. “It’s as if, for me, it’s dirty here. That’s what works here. My village is a completely different world.”

Ibrahim doesn’t denigrate or criticize easily, so I found his stark use of the word ‘dirty’ fascinating. I decided that he was using it in the same way that Johnny Cash uses it in the song ‘Hurt’, when he refers to ‘my empire of dirt’. The exhausted frenzy of modernity, ambition, career and monotonous hedonism, that’s Ibrahim’s ‘dirt’.

Tinariwen’s performance at the Highline Ballroom in the old meatpacking district of the lower west side is one of the best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty. They’re sharper, nimbler, less reserved and more self-confident, even as a five piece, without the visual stimulation of Hassan, their dancer and vibe master, or female backing vocalists. Said and Eyadou lock down and play like a soul-revue rhythm section, nailing their complex dialogue breezily and effortlessly. Abdallah spreads desert honey, like the Saharan pin-up that he is. Elaga stands stock still as always, his ker-chink slicing the air like the best James Brown or Lee Perry rhythm guitar.

Ibrahim battles through the show, smiling only once. His grave immobile presence is like a challenge to the hip bubbling New York crowd. To do what? To imagine a simplicity and a silence that their city will never know, but which, to Ibrahim, is the be-all and end-all. When he takes his acoustic guitar and sings a solo song, his voice parched, desiccated, otherworldly, the hubbub abates and splutters, and the imagination takes over. It almost feels as if, for just a few minutes, Ibrahim’s challenge has been accepted, the dirt has been wiped away and endless silence of the desert has descended on us all.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2006

Revised version of an article first published in The Observer – August 2011

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MC and kids in front of the ‘Discovery’ stage, Festival on the Niger 2014. (c) Andy Morgan.

PHOTO ESSAY – Festival on the Niger 2014

Ghostboy spoke in penetrating riddles. From his pale skin, I guessed he was a Fulani, with maybe a bit of Touareg or Arab thrown in there too. Not that it mattered. Bitterness and pride mixed in with the gentleness of his smooth face. He never smiled.

He followed us, my German friend Herman and I, down to the Niger river beach. He’d been following us since morning, glum, tight-lipped. He stuck to us despite my pep-talk. “I’m a musician too, you know,” he’d said after a while. “I write songs, and poetry.” “Ok, mon ami, I just gotta say something,” I answered, turning on him, rag already lost. “It’s no use just stalking us with claims that you’re a musician and a poet. You have to start the battle somehow. Don’t hawk the ghost of your talent, show it!!”

Those words felt brutal. Our whole relationship, with its crazy imbalances, felt brutal. Ghostboy was young, maybe 19 or 20 years old. He brought us Touareg jewellery, then Dogon carvings, then other stuff. It kept coming. He never gave up or let go. He didn’t say much but he seemed angry. I felt brutal.

The beach was a different space to the Festival, which was right next door. People were just doing whatever they normally do: stacking wood, carting goods, carrying dishes of oranges or dates on their head, lounging under lean-tos that leant like crazy, laughing, brewing tea. Upended, the empty porter carts looked like tomb-stones sculpted from metal tubing, with the handle forming a cross against the pale Sahelian sky. The wood piles made alleyways on the beach. The ferry trundled back and forth, disgorging its passengers at either shore. People didn’t take much notice of us. Life went on.

Approaching the Festival site you could feel the fever. It was hard to diagnose: music, release, expectation, opportunity, commerce, laughter, pride, they were all in there somewhere. Ninety-eight percent of the revellers were Malian. Most of the Europeans, not more than a hundred of them, had some kind of mission going on: journos, photographers, film-makers, funders, advisors, humanitarians, UN folk, diplomats, music managers, musicians. Not many straight-up just-curious tourists. This was still the red zone.

Last year, the Festival on the Niger had been cancelled at the last minute. French transport planes full of soldiers and hardware had landed in Bamako only two weeks before the festival was due to start. The troops were part of Operation Serval, on their way up north to fight the jihadists and put Mali back together again. Segou was on their route. You can’t have a much of a party with tanks rolling past your door.

“The whole economy of this region, the major part in any case, is geared around the festival,” Mamou Daffé told me. “Imagine a year without the festival. It meant that the economic and cultural stakeholders lost up to 80% of their revenue. It was terrible, enormous.”

Mamou Daffé founded the festival back in 2004. He was head of the local Office du Tourisme at the time. He wanted to haul Segou up out of its status as mere truck stop on the road to bigger tourist attractions – the African ‘Hobbiton’ of the Dogon country, Djenné with its mighty mud mosque, Timbuktu the legendary. Segou was once the capital of the Bambara kingdom, an animist polity bought low by the Islamic jihad of El Hadj Oumar Tall. Jihad is nothing new in these parts. Bamako was just a little fishing village back then. Now it’s Mali’s capital city and Segou’s just a relatively minor tourist attraction; Winchester to Bamako’s London. The big wheel keeps on turning.

This year the Festival on the Niger was celebrating its tenth birthday. It’s not as famous as the Festival in the Desert, but it should be. The site was impressive, the main stage a kind of pontoon floating in the Niger, a few metres off shore opposite a steeply sloping stone quay where the audience sit. There was another stage about four hundred metres away that focussed on up and coming talent. It was free to all comers during the day. In between them there was a marché with a few bars and a ‘street’ of stalls selling clothes, crafts, food, books or the work of organisations like the Segou University Students’ Association, the Segou Chamber of Commerce or MINUSMA – the UN mission to Mali. It all looked…well…like a festival; like WOMAD or Glastonbury, but much smaller and in Africa, on the banks of one of the greatest rivers in the world.

I went and loitered in the book stall. The complete works of Amadou Hampâté Ba were on sale. He’s the Malian writer and intellectual who said, about the griots: “Every time one of those old men die, it’s like a library that burns.” Or words like that. He also said, “between your truth and my truth lies the truth.” I like that. This is no time for absolutes. It’s a time to lick wounds, your own and those of others. It’s a time to value peace.

“Above all, we understood that peace is a resource, an extraordinary asset,” Mamou Daffé told me in answer to a question about the lessons of the crisis in the north of Mali. “We understood that without peace, nothing is possible. That’s why this particular edition of the festival is very welcome, with its powerful themes, which are national reconciliation, cultural diversity and national unity.”

So peace was back. So was music. The jihadists tried to ban all music except Quranic chanting in the north of Mali. But it just came back like Whack-a-mole. How could it not? Music in Mali is no different from the water that flows in the Niger, always there, glinting, life-giving: an old man smiling at his errant children.

The first night of the festival, the moon shone like a scimitar in the sky. I went to the Festival Village early, a nondescript space for about six hundred people a few kms away from the main site. It was empty. The mosquitoes were disco dancing around the strip lighting. Tonight was the Nuit de la Paix – A Night of Peace – organised by the Festival in the Desert, which was still banished from its home in Essakane near Timbuktu by threats of insecurity, real or imagined.

To contribute something meaningful to the cultural calendar, the Festival in the Desert had organised a Caravan of Peace in collaboration with the Festival on the Niger and the Taragalte Festival in southern Morroco. The caravan had travelled to Segou from its starting point at the Taragalte Festival, via various towns and refugee camps in Mauritania and Burkina Faso. It was a bold adventure. Khaira Arby and Amanar, the Touareg band from Kidal lead by Ahmed Ag Kaedi, had both taken part. Now, tonight, it was the Caravan’s grand finale, here, as guests of the Festival on the Niger.

But the Festival in the Desert weren’t happy. They wanted this statement of reconciliation and peace to be made on the main stage by the river, not in a ‘fringe’ space a few kms away. They needn’t have worried. By the time the MC came out wearing his tracksuit to start warming up, the Festival Village was packed. Mamou Daffé and Manny Ansar, director of the Festival in the Desert, were sitting all self-conscious and stiff amongst the big cheeses that always populate the front row of any important gig in Africa. The audience became looser, wilder, more joyful as you moved towards the back; the mamas all blithe and chatty in their riotously coloured robes and head dresses, young men in dickie bow ties, sharp enough to slice a heart in two, the youth giggling in their gaggles. The ambiance was good.

Speeches. Lots of speeches. Malians love their speeches. “’Daffé’ means ‘horse’ in the local language,” the MC tells us, “and the horse is most faithful of animals. Daffé is faithful to Segou. Thank you Daffé, Thank you Minusma, Serval, Morocco, Senegal. Peace, peace above all else.”  “The people already have peace in their hearts,” said Manny Ansar, “it’s up to the politicians now.”  “People talk about the north, but Manny is my brother,” answered Daffé.

A griotte in a lavish yellow dress comes on. Her voice splits the night like an axe slicing through kindling. It’s riveting, insistent. The guitar behind her sounds like the workings of some divine intestinal tract. A man is filming it all on his an iPad. Mali is documenting itself now.

The scimitar moon is slicing through the trees. Khaira Arby bustles onto the stage, all tough mama and female hardcore. That northern rhythm starts to roll out, recalibrating the movement of crowd. Excitement thickens. “Erkus! Erkus!!” she hollers – ‘Clap! Clap!’ (in Tamashek, the Touareg language). No enemies here, not now. No Bambara, Touareg, Songhoi, Dogon or Fulani. Just a crowd and their mad music-induced joy.

After only two songs, Khaira is followed by Amanar: tall shy Ahmed ag Kaedi and his Touareg posse from Kidal. Friends of the republic from deep behind ‘enemy’ lines. But this crowd loves them without moderation. When they play the song ‘Amidinin’ – a lilting version by Tinariwen’s Intidao has been made famous by national Malian TV – it sets the night on fire. I can hardly believe it. “My Friend.” That’s what the song title means. Mali, un et indivisible! – Mali, one and indivisible! At that moment it hits me. In the mouths of politicians, it’s just a slogan, a weapon of both war and peace. But here, in the ‘Gods’ at the back of La Nuit de la Paix, it’s a love thing, an irrational desire, a longing, a hope.

The next night I queued up at the main gates to the site with the good citizens of Segou who could afford the 10,000 CFA (c. £16) weekend ticket for the Festival. Many couldn’t and they stood there like Tiny Tims, noses pressed up against the glass ceiling.  We were all frisked, at least three times, before being let in.

“When Salif Keita does a gig in Bamako,” Daffé told me, “It’s 25,000 CFA just for him. Our ticket sales barely pay for the PA system. But we’re fighting an African fight. We said to ourselves, if we can’t provide 40-50% of the budget ourselves, then there wasn’t going to be a festival. It’s a matter of dignity and tradition for us to pay our own way. Here, in Segou, you’ll find an Africa that’s standing on its own two feet, and trying to take responsibility for itself.”

Everything was orderly. We sat on stone steps of the quay. Mobile phones glowed in the dark. The river glowed in the background. Super Biton de Segou’s opening riffs sucked out hollers of recognition. These guys are local heroes, named after Mamary Coulibaly aka ‘Bitòn’, former king of 18th century Segou and founder of the Bambara Empire. A fierce warrior, by all accounts. Mali needs the memory of its great warriors.

Super Biton de Ségou were one of Mali’s greatest orchestras in the days when every region of the country had its own band, financed by the state. They still stir local hearts with their cascading guitar riffs, the indefinable pulsation of their song, the tender currents of their melody. When they finish, the head of Segou’s chamber of commerce says a few words: “We thank the almighty for allowing this event to happen.” Then he praises the great river, calling it by its local name Joliba; “the symbol of the blood that runs through our veins.”

Mawula, a musical spectacular about a mythical vulture that seems to symbolise Mali’s fighting spirit is up next. I respect the festival for commissioning new and challenging work. I respect director Adama Traore, a legend in Malian theatre circles. But just when the audience is simmering, hungry for musical abandon, it gets treated to an hour and half long dirge of traditional hunters prancing round the stage, jihadists screaming ‘Allah u Akbar’ and women being raped. This might have worked at a more pensive time, earlier in the afternoon, but now, despite the calabash women, wild leaping men and raw searing chants that reminded me of Moroccan Aissawa, it falls flat on its face. People start to leave. “We don’t want to be reminded about the war,” a local man tells me later, “we want to relax and enjoy music.” The moon is a silver teardrop falling through the clouds.

Next day, down on the river beach, Ghostboy told me about a dream he once had. “It was about Jesus. I saw him walking on the river. Right there. I’m a Muslim but I still dreamed about Jesus.” I made some flippant remark to the effect that he must be feeling confused. And then I felt ashamed. I sat there, watching the world unwind to dusk, listening dutifully and intently to Ghostboy’s strange ramblings.

On the smaller ‘discovery’ stage Ben Zabo never unzipped his smile. There he was, a local boy made good come home to his people. There’s no greater joy than that. His band, all wearing the ‘mohawk’ crest of the animist Bwa people, cured the oppression of heat and dust with raw cruising funk. We all had smiles zipped on to our faces.

That same afternoon I’d seen the rapper Mylmo being mobbed by a crowd of local fans. He left me with the feeling that I had to revisit all my preconceptions about Malian music. It’s the rappers who fill the stadiums here, not the griots or the old dance bands. And although some of them have taken a fancy to chunky Eric B and Rakim style chains, super fly threads and Beemers, the best rappers have become the voice of the voiceless, those who “say on high what is being thought below.”

Mylmo is considered to be among the best. He’s a prince, tall, talented and full of shy charm. He strides on to the main stage to a mighty cheer and asks us all to observe a minute’s silence for the fallen soldiers. The moon is a bright lemon, alive and tart. The river blushes silver. Mylmo takes hold of the flow, dedicates a song to Nelson Mandela and shouts “We’re rappers, not gangsters!” The moussou – the women – scream!  Mylmo substitutes bombs and AK47s with the mic and the tama drum. He sings an homage to Oumou Sangare. The moussou go wild. He spits a tune about teenagers who go into prostitution. The moussou get even wilder. Specific lines bust the scream-o-meter. I revel in the spectacle whilst cursing my incomprehension. Fellow rappers Tal B and Master Soumy come on for guest spots – a Malian rap summit. The wildness redoubles.

The moon is an eye full of love. This is a night for the moussou. Stelbee from Burkina Faso is a femme consciente: a blender of reggae, African sensuality and Gallic style. She’s a warm mug of peace, love and togetherness. The moussou love her. They’re dancing in the river. I’m not so sure.

Sekouba Bambino appears all in white, a vision of romantic perfection. He comes from Guinea, just like the river. “Women will welcome him, men will tolerate him,” the MC tells us. A djembe drum clatters. A balaphon rattles.  Everybody stands up. Sharp-tongued moussou berate their sisters for blocking their view. “This one’s for peace!” Deci-belles! Sekouba Bambino’s voice has more power and suppleness that even Salif Keita’s. But Salif’s has the crackle of experience. Sekouba is sensuality personified, in a land whose sensual fires are regularly doused by Muslim reserve. Although tonight, barely.

Mornings were for talking. The conferences at the Centre Culturel Koré, another of the Festival’s ambitious initiatives, told me that Mali has long lost its sense of deference. The debates were lively. The panelists often under fire. Next door the exhibition space was showing work by Malian artists and photographers on themes such as ‘Love’ or ‘the Masks and Puppets of Mali’. In the dusty back alleys, Orange organized a free stage for hip hop. There was an international fair at the Foire Kènè and traditional troupes at the Festival Village. This was a city-wide feast of culture.

I stumbled on a river pageant just by chance, of men and women chanting the rawest roots music I’ve heard in moons. It sounded like the dusty grandmother of Moroccan gnawa, which made complete sense. They arrived in huge pirogues, like itinerant party-makers, banging, chanting, wailing. The quays were packed and expectant. Then the dances started. A fish crawled onto the beach, snapping wildly at anyone who approached. Then a crocodile. Then a hippo. It was a wild screeching rush, gleeful and breathless, like riding a helter-skelter without ever leaving the ground. Mali’s animist heart beat loud, the one that some feared lost.

That night, the last, the MC was superbly comic. People were in stitches. “Voulez vous voir le cheval blaaannnc!!!” (“Do you wanna see the white horrrrsssse!”). It took me a while to work out he was talking about Salif. But first I had to tussle with Mao Otayeck: Lebanese Ivory Coaster via LA, Paris, Dakar and some place in the middle of the Atlantic that I have no wish to ever see or hear. The man’s got credentials – Stevie Wonder, Alpha Blondy and many others, so it’s hard to explain my aversion to this kind of music: too many instruments, too many notes, too much clever fiddling and faddling around. Just fucking entertainment, that’s all it is.

The moon peeps shy through the clouds. Vieux Farka Toure cleans the palate. Black suit, white rock’n’roll energy, total confidence. This is Songhoi guitar music for the 21st century, respectful of Ali Farka but free of him too. Vieux doesn’t have the poetic touch of his father, but he has plenty of 1.6 Litre V8 turbo-charged guitar licks. All you have to do is get on board, strap yourself in and enjoy the level horizons of the Sahel as they blur past you. It rocks.

Then its Salif. The King himself. A Keita to his very marrow. Floppy white hat, brown black tabard. How many victories and defeats are there in that voice? It’s not the most beautiful any more, not in the conventional conservatoire sense at least. But it holds whole histories of yearning. The backing band are loose and relaxed. Or should that be shambolic? Don’t know, don’t care. The guitar has the fluency of speech. The kamelgoni scratches you in all the right places. The music picks you up and cradles you. There’s a change of tempo. The energy rises several notches. Salif leaps in the air.  Then…

Wow. I’m watching Salif Keita on the banks of the Niger, in his heartlands: the old river in the background, calm, ghost-silver, indulgent life-giver.

It’s all endless. Then it ends.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2014

First published in fRoots – May 2014

PHOTO ESSAY – Festival on the Niger 2014

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