Islamist mujahedeen in northern Mali

The situation along the demarcation line that separates Islamist-held northern Mali from the south of the country is agonizingly confusing.  The Malian army claim to have recaptured the strategic town of Douentza, while the Islamist claim the complete opposite. According their spokesperson, the bearded Sanda ould Boumama, the combined forces of AQIM, Ansar ud-Dine and MUJAO have pushed the Malian army back at least as far as the small town of Konna, if not further. Meanwhile France has mobilised some elite troops from a base in Chad and sent them to Sevaré, the town on the main east-west highway that serves as a transport hub for the Mopti region. The idea of Islamists capturing Mopti itself, Mali’s second largest city which is now dangerously close to the frontline, would be an A-grade nightmare not only for Mali but also for France and the international community. France has spent the last few months trying to persuade the US and the UN that need for action in northern Mali is urgent, without a great deal of success. There are also reports of an aerial bombardment of Konna although whether it was carried out by France or by Ukranian mercenaries isn’t entirely clear. The latest new from AFP, no more than two minutes old, is that the Malian army has counter-attacked, and no doubt hopes to retake Konna by night fall.

Talking of mercenaries, a local man from Konna reported that most of the Islamist fighters he encountered in the town were darker-skinned Songhai or Fulani. Some also clearly belonged to other black African nationalities; Nigerian, Guinean, Senegalese, Ivorian, even Bambara and Malinké from southern Mali. In terms of the ‘lower’ ranks at least, this is no longer a clear cut conflict between ‘white’ Arabs and Touareg from the northern deserts and ‘black’ Songhai, Peul, Bambara etc from regions further south. It has become a great deal more ‘asymmetrical’ than that, with black Africans fighting both for and against the Islamists. Some of the mujahedeen at Konna were also very young, no more than in their mid-teens, if that. The International Criminal Court in the Hague is going to be busy if and when this conflict ends.  My hunch is that the men who took Konna belong to the Ansar as-Sunna brigade, MUJAO’s recently formed unit designed to mobilize the local Songhai and Peul youth. Many of these young men will be from the Gao region and given the hitherto transparent will of the large majority of the city’s population to reunite with Mali at the earliest possible opportunity, the fact that they are now attacking the very country they purport to love so dearly indicates a severe case of either mass brain-washing or of desperate mercenary activity.

Meanwhile, the UN Security Council met in emergency session to “express their grave concern over the reported military movements and attacks by terrorist and extremist groups in the north of Mali, in particular their capture of the city of Konna, near Mopti,” according to a Security Council press statement.  The Council called for a rapid deployment of the African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA) and the immediate issuance of an agreed political road map, which includes serious negotiations with non-extremist Malians in the north and presses for the full restoration of democratic governance. It seems that the EU, UN and USA’s preferred option of a slow careful build-up to an invasion of the north by a Malian lead force of ECOWAS, AU and French Special Forces, with D Day set sometime next September and plenty of negotiation in between, has proved to be all too leisurely and fantastical.

Granted, the world and his dog knows that the Malian are in no fit state to fight a war in the north of the country. A military establishment that was riddled with corruption and incompetence even before the current crisis began has been bought to a state of catastrophic unreadiness by the army’s defeat at the hands of the MNLA and the Islamist coalition last April. It must also be remembered that the Malian army hasn’t won a military victory in the north without the use of Arab and Touareg militia since the early 1960s. The idea that the Salafist coalition currently ruling northern Mali was going to patiently wait around until next September whilst the Malian army was rebuilt with funding and expertise from the European Union was wishful thinking. The last few months have felt like a phoney war. There’s been nothing phoney about the fighting in the last few days.

Talking about the Fog of War in relation to northern Mali would be meteorologically unsound. Fog is almost unheard of in the Sahel. Better to call it the sandstorm of war, a haze that is more impenetrable and dangerous than fog. The vastly conflicting accounts of victories, defeats, advances, retreats, casualties and captives that have come spewing forth from the mouths of the spokespersons on either side of the conflict in recent days illustrate the dire opacity of this conflict and the near impossibility for a journalist to find the copper-bottomed truth about what is going on. A friend who works for Al Jazeera recently told me that in her honest opinion, the war in Northern Mali is the hardest conflict to understand in the world. Even obsessives like myself, who spend more time reading reports and analyses about the crisis or talking to people closely involved than is strictly healthy, have to admit that more often than not we are enveloped in a sandstorm of supposition and guess work.

Such is the case with the recent Islamist advance. I’ll give you my hunch, but it’s only a hunch. Short of trading my safe European home for a god-forsaken AQIM hostage camp in the Tegharghar mountains, I can’t do any better.  My guess is that the Iyad Ag Ghali, emir of the Touareg lead Islamist militia Ansar ud-Dine has become impatient with the Burkinabé sponsored mediation process between Mali and the two ‘Malian’ rebel factions, the nationalist MNLA and Ansar ud-Dine, which has been dragging on for a few months. The resumption of these talks that was due to take place on January 10th has now been pushed back to January 21st. Algeria has also re-entered the fray as a mediator, a role which it considered its own almost by divine right before it was taken off them by Burkina Faso at the beginning of the rebellion last February. This has no doubt taken the wind out of the Ougadougou talks and confused matters considerably. Both Ansar ud-Dine and MNLA signed an agreement to cease hostilities and pursue negotiation with Mali in Algiers on December 21st.  It’s this agreement which Ansar ud-Dine are now reneging upon.

The belligerent talk coming out of Bamako following the guarded approval given to a military intervention in the north by the UN in December undoubtedly angered Iyad Ag Ghali and his Touareg side-kicks.  You can feel this anger in the tone of the Political Platform which Ansar ud-Dine posted on their website on January 2nd.  What Iyad and his ghostwriter are saying, in grossly simplified terms is the following:  “I trusted you (Mali) at the end of the rebellion of the 1990s. You betrayed my trust by reneging on your promises and fomenting ethnic war in the north. This was gross ingratitude considering that it was ‘my’ rebellion that enabled you to overthrow your military dictatorship and bring back multi-party democracy in 1992. Now, once again, you’re double-crossing me. You persuaded us to agree to a cease-fire and to renouncing the armed struggle while you were busy importing tanks from Bulgaria and talking about war day in day out. Well if you want war, you can have it.” Iyad, a wily old jackal if ever there was, is no doubt gambling on the fact that the Malian army is too weak to offer any great resistance to his mujahedeen. He also knows that if he were to capture Mopti, the pressure this would then heap on the military junta and its political puppets in Bamako would be so immense that even if his Islamist army couldn’t hold such a large and hostile city for long, it might just afford him the time and strength to push through his demands for an autonomous Azawad modeled on the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq. It’s a high stakes game but that’s nothing new. Ever since he launched the rebellion of 1990 with a handful of men and a few old Touareg swords, Iyad has proven himself to be a high-stakes player, at least in military terms.

The guessing game becomes even more enthralling when one tries to work out what’s happening within the Islamist coalition itself.  There have been significant changes in the last few months, but owing to the standstorm of war it’s been extremely hard to make any sense of them.  First the old desert fox, ‘Mr Marlboro’, Moktar Belmoktar was given his marching orders by the MUJAO command in Gao.  Was his old adversary Abou Zeid, head of AQIM in Timbuktu, just too sick and tired of him?  Was Belmocktar sick and tired of the more brutal and zany behaviour of the MUJAO chiefs in Gao?  Was he just piqued that the emirship of Al Qaida in the Sahara was handed over to Yahya Abou El Hamam rather than to him? Who knows.  After Belmoktar’s departure, there has been further splintering or atomizing of the Islamist movement, generally along ethnic lines.  A notorious drug don by the name of Sultan Ould Badi has formed a new militia called the Katiba Salah Eddine, after the famous scourge of Europe’s medieval Crusaders. Salah Eddine members are mostly Tilemsi Arabs from the villages north of Gao. Ould Badi was apparently none too pleased when the Mujahedeen Shura Council in Gao decided to go and ‘clean up’ In Khalil, a notorious border town north of Tessalit, the Sahara’s very own Ciudad Juarez, which is an entrepot for every kind of illegal merchandising making its way north or south, east or west through the desert. Ould Badi obviously balked at the idea that his carefully constructed smuggling networks might be dismantled or taken over.

Also in December, a certain Abdullah from Benin took control of yet another Islamist militia called the Katiba Ousmane Dan Fodio, named after a early nineteenth century Islamic preacher and jihadist who founded the Sokoto caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria. Abdullah came from the ranks of the Nigerian Islamist Boko Haram to take over the Ousmane Dan Fodio militia, which is said to comprise black Africans from Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ivory Coast.  At around the same time MUJAO announced the creation of Ansar as-Sunna, a new katiba with four sub-brigades which, as stated earlier, is a vehicle for the scared and impoverished Songhoi and Fulani youth of Gao and its neighboring villages.  Finally, in the last few days, the redoubtable Omar ould Hamaha, aka Red Beard, has created his own katiba called Ansar Shari’a north of Timbuktu. This militia regroups the Berabiche Arabs of Timbuktu, Araouane and the neighbouring desert.

Are we seeing a planned and strategic reorganization of the Islamist coalition or a messy disintegration along ethnic lines that mirrors the fate of the Touareg rebel movement in the early 1990s? I suspect it is the latter. The desert has a tendency to work against unity and federation. Groups with from different ethnicities and with different interests manage to come together under a common banner for short periods of time, but then invariably revert to their natural state of independence and isolation. Any strong man with a little money and influence can set himself up as a new katiba and thus ensure his own and his family’s share of the spoils of both the war and the peace that must follow it. It’s also possible that the current atomization has to do with finance. Perhaps AQIM’s coffers are running a little bare due to lack of ransom income and reduced smuggling revenue. Without money, it would be hard for them to maintain a unified coalition in the north and persuade go-it-alone hotheads to stay together.

If we are seeing a disintegration of the movement, then this would add substance to the arguments of those who favor negotiation and a wait and see policy rather than swift military action. Perhaps there’s no need to defeat the Islamists militarily. Perhaps they’ll simply implode under the pressure of their own internal bickering. Perhaps this splintering is also the reason why Iyad has now decided to push south. No one knows the fractious tribal politics of the Sahara better than him and memories of the disintegration of the Touareg rebellion following the signing of the National Pact in 1992 no doubt still rankle deep within him. He knows that inaction leads to disintegration. If you want to unite your troops, go to war, or else provoke your enemy into attacking you. You can probably find that somewhere in the writings of von Clausewitz, the German philosopher of war to whom Iyad himself is apparently quite partial. If this is Iyad’s strategy, it’s showing early signs of success. His offensive has indeed lured French special ground forces and helicopters into the region, both of which will be deemed a heathen provocation by the Islamist constituency ofNorth and West Africa. The French presence will also no doubt boost recruitment to the Islamist cause.

However, the question of exactly how Iyad Ag Ghali has managed to bring together these disparate Islamist forces to attack Konna and push south still remains to be answered.  What deals have been done?  How does Iyad’s stated desire to see an autonomous Azawad sit with Ansar as-Sunna’s Songhoi footsoldiers desire to avoid a Touareg-dominated state in northern Mali at all costs. What’s in it for MUJAO?  They have never proclaimed the independence of Azawad, quite the opposite, and indeed only managed to rally the citizens of Gao to their side in their fight with the MNLA for the control of Gao back in June precisely because they claimed to defend the idea of a united of Mali.  And what of Algeria, Qatar or those Wahabi Saudi magnates with their petro-dollars and all the other shadowy forces who may or may not be playing a part in the current conflict. But that’s another sandstorm, even more impenetrable than the one that’s currently heading south towards Mopti.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2013

Iyad Ag Ghali – Leader of Ansar ud-Dine

Even though it’s highly improbable that Iyad Ag Ghali wrote this tract, with its eloquent and flowing French, a language that Iyad is apparently not particularly enamoured with, I believe that it represents his political philosophy, his aims and objectives pretty accurately. I haven’t spoken to him to confirm this (who has?!!) but my hunch remains strong. Iyad sincerely believes that strict Salafist Islam is the ONLY way for his country and his people to return to strength, independence, justice and ultimately peace. And here, in this posting, his arguments are laid out plainly and coherently for everyone to read and react to. Now, you may disagree with him. Many in the international community…most…will disagree with him. But I believe that it’s no longer sufficient simply to claim that Iyad and Ansar Eddine are the pawns of Algeria or Qatar, or that their whole Salafi project is a smokescreen behind which the lucrative job of trading drugs, arms, people and cigarettes can continue (NB the final sentence of the platform vows pitiless justice and retribution on drug barons and major criminals). The basic message in the platform is that the post-colonial and democratic system in West Africa has failed the people miserably. Many ordinary citizens of Mali and its neighboring countries would agree with that assertion. The question is what is the alternative. Iyad believes that it is Islam. Many disagree with him. But many, more than we in the west find it comfortable to admit to, do in fact agree with him, partially if not entirely.

A couple of things strike me about Ansar Eddine’s platform. The first is that if you remove the religious references and Salafi rhetoric, the entire document could easily have been written by the MNLA propaganda machine. It’s Touareg nationalism pure and simple. This goes a long way to explain the occasional alliances between the MNLA and Ansar ud-Dine. At their core, their several projects are one and the same – a strong, independent, proud and free Azawad. It’s the Salafi and Shari’a aspect that divides them. In country less prone to settling its political problems with the Kalash, these positions might be represented by two legitimate political parties, one that favours a secular, liberal, democratic and pro-Western approach and another that favours an Islamist, Shari’a driven, anti-Western one. The situation in northern Mali is in fact analogous to that in Tunisia or Egypt. It’s only the stark peculiarity of the territory, with its vastness, its remoteness, its vacuum of governmental power, its lack of state security apparatus etc, that gives the political struggle in northern Mali its peculiarly violent, anarchic and dramatic character.

The black salafist flag that flutters in the hot desert breeze over Timbuktu symbolises the abject failure of western policy in the Sahel over the past decade or more. Many millions of dollars and euros that have been spent by the US, France and the EU to train the armies of Mali, Niger and Mauritania in counter-terrorism and to reinforce local judicial systems and police forces have, in effect, been frittered away.

The trust that western powers, especially the US and France, once placed in the toppled regime of the ex-Malian President, Amadou Toumani Touré, has been betrayed in spectacular fashion. They trusted him because they thought, or rather hoped in face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that he was a true democrat. In fact he was a really soldier at heart, a machiavellian manipulator of tribal politics and sponsor of self-serving networks of interest, corruption and even crime.

The US hoped that by training the Malian army to fight the mujahedeen of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), who have been rampaging with near impunity in Mali’s northern deserts since 2008, they could empower a local solution to the problem of Islamic terrorism in the Sahel and avoid the pitfalls of doing the job themselves. Contrary to appearances, US global counter-terrorism policy has matured since the days when the Rumsfeld doctrine of direct military intervention was applied in Iraq. The Pentagon now knows that direct intervention is usually counter-productive, resurrecting as it does the red rag of American imperialism and driving hordes of young disaffected Arabs and Africans into the arms of Al Qaida and other terrorist groups.

It can be argued that indirect foreign military intervention has been partially successful in the case of Mauritania and Niger. Mauritania has been a willing participant in US counter-terrorism initiatives in the Sahel since 2002, including the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) that was launched in 2005 with an annual budget of $100 million. It has also been a cornerstone of the US military’s annual Operation Flintlock exercises designed to increase local military and security capacity in West Africa. France has helped to fund and train the Mauritanian army’s rapid reaction units, and has played an increasing role in advising and strengthening the Mauritanian judiciary.

As a result, Mauritania has become the most ardent and effective opponent of AQIM in region, clinching several modest military victories against the terror group, most notably the joint Mali-Mauritanian attack on the cell of the redoubtable AQIM emir Abou Zeid in the Wagadou Forest of northern Mali in June 2011.

But Mauritania’s belligerence could still cost it dear. AQIM’s virulent hatred of Mauritanian President Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz and his regime and the close links between local jihadists and the MUJAO, an AQIM spin off that now controls the strategically important city of Gao in eastern Mali, threaten to destabilise Mauritania. A massive car-bomb attempt on President Aziz’s life in February 2011 was foiled by the army but the President might not be so lucky next time. Furthermore, the Aziz regime has recently been mired in some weighty corruption scandals of its own, and there’s evidence that its popularity at home is on the slide. Mauritania’s close cooperation with the West could backfire if local disaffection translates into more willing jihadists on the ground.

President Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger has so far played a commendably level-headed and intelligent part in the crisis that has swamped the Sahel. The odds are against the world third poorest nation, beset as it is by the Libyan crisis to the north, the Malian civil war to the west and Boko Haram to the south, as well as catastrophic droughts, a massive refugee problem and the return of many thousands of migrant workers from Libya and other countries in the Maghreb.

Contrary to President Toure’s lax response in Mali, Issoufou was adamant about disarming Touareg fighters who flooded south into Ngier from the Libyan war last year. He has also made strenuous efforts to engage tribal chiefs and Touareg rebel leaders from Niger’s northern deserts in the country’s political institutions, promoting open government and freedom of expression in the process. His drive to achieve food self-sufficiency, a massively ambitious target that he’s busy promoting with the slogan Les Nigeriens Nourrissent Les Nigeriens – Nigeriens Feed Nigeriens – is both very necessary and popular at home. He has also been helped by the battle-fatigue caused by the bitter Touareg uprising of 2007-9.

Most importantly in regional terms, Issoufou is trying to turn the Malian crisis to his advantage by taking over from Mali as France’s most trusted and valued ally in the Sahel.  France needs Niger’s uranium, a fact that was strenuously underlined when President François Hollande met President Issoufou in Paris last June and urged him to make every effort to bring the massive new uranium mine at Imouraren in Niger on-stream as soon as possible. Niger and France have also been increasing their military cooperation and talking about a coordinated response to the terrorist threat.

Niger’s current state of grace is extremely fragile however. The problems of drought, refugees and returning migrants threaten to tip the country towards disaster at any moment. The Touareg in the north of the country could still make common cause with the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (NMLA), the Touareg rebel movement in northern Mali, presently licking its wounds after defeat at the hands of AQIM and its allies in Gao and Timbuktu, if their fortunes were ever to improve and the prospect of an independent Touareg-led Azawad became more likely.

In the case of Mali, however, the western policy of indirect intervention has been a disaster. The reasons for this are complex but boil down to the fact that, despite a few direct confrontations in 2010 and 2011 that cost the lives of a number of soldiers, Mali has never displayed the willingness or the military capacity needed to rid its country of the scourge of AQIM. Moreover, there is substantial evidence, including a direct admission made by the loyalist Touareg officer Colonel Alhadji Ag Gamou to the French newspaper Le Figaro in July this year, that Mali allowed AQIM to set up a safe-haven in the north east of the country, so long as it didn’t commit any acts of terrorism on Malian soil.

Why?  First, because Mali hoped that the presence of AQIM in the heart of Touareg rebel country would seriously damage and divide the Touareg secessionist cause.  In that regard, their hopes have been fully answered by recent events. Secondly, AQIM managed to  orge strong alliances with certain powerful figures from the Arab communities in northern Mali, some of whom were involved in drug and weapons trafficking. The government in Bamako had an interest in keeping these powerful northern figures on their side. And thirdly, the Malian army has always been incapable of securing military victory in the north, either against Touareg rebels or Islamic terrorists. Better to leave AQIM be than risk the lives of many more ordinary Malian soldiers. Despite this, the USA and France continued to pour millions into Mali’s military and security apparatus, money that all too often evaporated like a desert mirage as soon as it was spent. You need only read the cables sent by the US Embassy in Bamako and later exposed by Wikileaks to feel the extreme frustration that Mali’s lack of resolve in its fight against AQIM provoked in the diplomatic community in Bamako and elsewhere.

Thanks to bitter experience, the US now knows that you cannot use southern armies, who are used to combat in temperate sub-Saharan zones, to fight wars out in the open deserts of the Sahara. That’s why it has been reluctant to support a regional threat to launch an ECOWAS force of 3,000 troops against the various armed groups in the north of Mali, and has made sure that this reluctance has been echoed by the UN.

The only force capable of taking on and beating AQIM in northern Mali is the Algerian army. The armies of Morocco or Chad might also prove effective, but neither country has shown any willingness to become militarily involved so far, even if it were ever possible for them to do so, which is doubtful. The belief is growing that Algeria holds most of the keys to the problem. Nevertheless, it has always considered northern Mali to be its own backyard, and has put every possible effort into keeping it free of outside interference, whether from France, America, ECOWAS or anybody else. Moreover, so far at least, Algeria has kept its substantial military might well within its own borders.

Not that Algeria is unconcerned about the chaos in Mali. On the contrary, it views the idea of an independent Touareg state on its southern borders with extreme alarm. It has a substantial Touareg population of its own, who dominate its strategically important and mineral-rich southern deserts, and it fears that a Touareg victory in Mali could provoke those desert populations into copy-cat dissent. This fear also extends to the numerous other Berber populations in Algeria, especially the economically and politically powerful Kabyles. Algeria knows that any Touareg victory will be seen as a Berber victory at home, and the Berber cause for greater political and cultural rights has been a thorn in the foot of every Algerian government since independence.

The same is true in Libya, a country riven by racism and ethnic strife that has increased tenfold since the demise of Ghadafi. Recent anti-Touareg pogroms in the southern city of Ghadames and clashes between black-skinned Tubu and armed Arab militia in Sebha demonstrate the volatile relationship of Berber and African minorities with the Arab majority. Salafist elements in the new government see an AQIM hegemony over northern Mali as preferable to a Touareg state. Moreover, most of the weapons currently blighting the peace of northern Mali come from Libyan arsenals.

Rather than sending in the troops, Algeria has played an extremely subtle hand in the current conflict. Just before the outbreak of the Touareg rebellion in January, it sent a group of military personnel to the strategically important army base in the northern Malian town of Tessalit. As the NMLA wanted to avoid an open confrontation with Algeria at all costs, this move had the effect of delaying a Touareg victory by several months. Then, whether by shady design piloted by the Algeria secret services or merely by happenstance, AQIM and its allies managed to hi-jack the Touareg rebellion and kick the idea of an independent Azawad into the long grass. This outcome suited Algeria, despite the fact that the leaders of AQIM are ex-members of the GIA and GSPC, the terrorist groups responsible for the worst of the violence during Algeria’s dark decade of the 1990s. Better in Algeria’s mind for these home-grown jihadist to be causing havoc outside Algerian borders, than to let the existence of an independent Touareg state threaten Algeria’s territorial integrity.

Both France and the USA have never managed to have much leverage on Algerian foreign policy. The only real and immediate military solution to the chaos in northern Mali is therefore frustratingly beyond their grasp. The dominant super-powers will be forced to find other ways of containing the Islamist threat in the Sahel, a threat that could turn the entire region against them and spread into Europe and beyond.

Some fundamental questions will need to be asked. Can African governments be trusted to fight terror and crime, even if they are democratically elected?  What is more important, the integrity of African states or the fight against Islamic terrorism?  Is the nation-state even the best form of political organization in the Sahara?  Is it possible to win the war on terror with military might alone?  Finding answers to these questions is a challenge that becomes more and more pressing as the black flag continues to flutter over Timbuktu.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2012

First published in BBC Focus On Africa Magazine – September 2012

These are serious accusations which bolster the long-standing theory that Algeria is using Islamist groups as proxies in Northern Mali to carry out its principle foreign policy aims in the region. These aims are, first and foremost, to prevent the creation of an independent state of Azawad by any means necessary.  Secondly, to make sure no foreign power, apart from itself of course, sends troops or humanitarian aid to northern Mali.  Thirdly, to ensure that Algeria remains the primary economic, diplomatic, political and developmental force in the region. And lastly, to make sure that Algeria eventually regains its historic role as power-broker and mediator par excellence in any conflict between Touareg separatists in the north east of Mali and the government in Bamako.  The job has temporarily been given to Burkina Faso, after the MNLA refused to allow Algeria to play their usual role back in February, stating that Algerian mediation had always ended proving disastrous for the Touareg cause. Algeria would like that role back.

Almost every leading politician or military leader of note with more than a passing interest in the situation in northern Mali has been beating a path to Algiers in recent weeks, from the newly appointed French foreign minister Laurent Fabius to the Malian Prime Minster Cheikh Modibo, as well as officers from the now as-good-as defunct Malian army.  For the moment, the Algerian government is listening and sitting pretty, refusing to take part in any military intervention in the north east whilst allowing the kudos and the solicitations to accrue.  The cynics and conspiracy-theorists would say that it doesn’t have to intervene militarily.  It has proxies like Iyad Ag Ghali and his Islamist Ansar ud-Dine militia or Al Qaida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in situ, on the ground, fulfilling its military objectives in a satisfactory way already.  But when the time is right, it will be ready and able move in the troops.

Whether or not the Algerian secret services, the DRS, are the puppeteers of the current chaos in northern Mali, Algeria’s policy in the region should become part of the curriculum taught to every student of African politics or international relations for years to come.  To put it simply, it has been masterful.  The prospect of an independent Azawad was no more welcome to Algeria at the start of the conflict than the prospect of an independent Kurdistan is to Turkey or Iran.  The Touareg of southern Algeria have never been as rebellious and belligerent as their cousins in northern Mali, but the government in Algiers knows full well that it wouldn’t take much to turn the simmering social tensions in its southern Saharan wilayas, or provinces, into a conflagration that it might find hard to control. The very idea of Touareg independence only needs success, or the perception of success, to gain considerable traction amongst the Touareg populations of other countries in the region, especially Algeria, Niger and Libya.  Furthermore, Touareg success is seen as Berber success, especially by Berber minorities in Algeria and Libya who have hungered for some kind of breakthrough in their fight for great political and cultural freedom for a long time.  The Berber struggle, particularly in the northern Algerian province of Kabylia, has been the main internal headache of Algerian governments since independence.  The last thing President Bouteflika needs right now in these fragile post-Arab ‘Spring’ times is for the numerous and restless Kabyle in his country, fired-up by the onward march of their Berber cousins in northern Mali, to launch a major uprising or secessionist attempt.

Moreover, Algeria takes a dim view of the prospect of Touareg separatists entering into any kind of cosy relationship with France and thereby letting the old colonial power regain a central role in the affairs of the Sahara, a role it has coveted ever since the late 1950s when it made an attempt to keep hold of the Sahara after independence.  France has always said that it’s number one priority is to put Mali back together again. But when will fighting Islamic terrorism override the priority of territorial integrity in the Sahel. And if it does, wouldn’t the MNLA, who are desperately putting themselves forward for the job, partner up well with France in the fight to rid northern Mali of rabid Islamist mujahedeen. The US, who, as the many Wikileaked Bamako embassy cables prove, have long had a surprisingly good grasp of the arcane politics of northern Mali, are no doubt asking themselves the same questions.  But, to put it crudely, Algeria’s general message to France, Europe and the US since the start of the uprising has been “Hands off!  The north of Mali has always been our backyard and we intend to keep it that way.”  Although the mineral and oil wealth that supposedly lies tantalizingly close under the sands of northern Mali has yet to be fully exploited, Algeria will aim to make sure that it has a major hand in its exploitation when the time comes.  It doesn’t want Australian, Canadian, French or Qatari companies sticking their mining noses in an area they feel is rightfully theirs.

When Khadafy fell last autumn, the prospects for Algerian foreign policy in northern Mali weren’t good. Contrary to popular belief, the wily Libyan dictator, who was as averse to the idea of an independent Touareg state in the Sahara as his counterparts in Algiers, had always been able to control, dampen and snuff out troublesome outbreaks of Touareg rebelliousness whilst simultaneously strutting around pretending to be a great friend of the Touareg and supporter of their cause.  With Khadafy’s useful blocking presence now swept away, and with truckloads of weapons pouring out of the arsenals of Libya, Algeria knew even before the outbreak of the rebellion on January 17th, that this time round, Touareg nationalism in northern Mali was going to become a major headache and foreign policy challenge. The MNLA’s rebuff of their early mediation proposal only enhanced that uneasy feeling.  But wisely, instead of carrying out a full frontal military intervention, they sat and waited, bolstering the military readiness of their army units stationed in Tamanrasset, and boosting their air-strike capacity.  They also sent a small contingent of army personnel to the key Malian military base of Amachache in Tessalit, a move which cleverly delayed the MNLA’s full frontal assault on the base by several weeks.  Meanwhile they refused to allow wounded MNLA soldiers into Algeria to get treatment, in contravention of the Geneva convention, and contained the many thousands of refugees who poured over their southern borders, fleeing the conflict.

In late March, when it looked like the Malian army was being routed by the MNLA and their Touareg Islamist allies in Ansar ud-Dine, and that total defeat was only days away, seven Algerian diplomats were kidnapped by the Islamist militia, the MUJAO, from the Algerian consulate in Gao.  Whether the dark hand of DRS manipulation played a part in this event or not, it allowed Algeria to present itself as a victim of the troubles, with a grievance that might legitimize its intervention, if necessary.  Then, after the MNLA prematurely declared the independence of Azawad on April 1st, matters began to go miraculously well for Algeria.  The boss of Ansar ud-Dine, Iyad Ag Ghali, a Touareg strong man who has been intimate with the Algerian military and security establishment since his days as leader of the nationalist MPLA in the early 1990s, basically hi-jacked the MNLA’s victory, replacing nationalism with Islamism and stating that his purpose was only Sharia law in the whole of Mali and not any kind of Touareg independence.  Suddenly, Ansar ud-Dine seemed to emerge as by far the strongest military group in the north, stuffed with well equipped, well paid and experienced fighters from the Ifoghas, the traditional ruling Touareg clan in the north east.  Where did Ag Ghaly find all the money to transform what had been a minor group comprising a few hundred men at the start of the uprising in January into the leading military power in the north.  Was it from his friends in Algeria?  Was it from super-wealthy contacts he made in Saudi Arabia back in 2007, when he was posted to the Malian consulate in Jeddah?  Was it from the Prince of Qatar, always happy to see the advancement of Salafist ideologies anywhere in the Muslim world?  Was it from rich local Arab drug barons?  Was it from the war chests of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, bloated by the proceeds of their kidnapping exploits in recent years?  Was it from a combination, or even all, of these?

Soon after the MNLA’s indepdence declaration on April 1st, AQIM and MUJAO surged from nowhere and grabbed Timbuktu and Gao respectively, both using Ag Ghali and Ansar ud-Dine as a kind of front to appease local Touareg.  Both these terror organizations were in effect representing the interests of local Arab-speaking populations and especially those of powerful Berabiche Arab and Tilemsi Arab drug smuggling dons, who also reviled the prospect of a Touareg dominated independent Azawad. The aims of these powerful Arabs chimed perfectly with those of the Algerian government, and with what was left of the Malian government as well: we all must prevent an independent Azawad at all costs. No one can understand what’s happening in northern Mali without trying to get to grips with Arab vs Touareg tribalism, which is a tale of mind-befuddling complexity and longevity in itself.

Then, a few weeks ago, MUJAO, with the backing of the local Songhai population, who were also desperately keen for Gao and the north to remain part of Mali, managed to kick the MNLA out of the city.  This was a major defeat, and an acute embarrassment, as the MNLA had long declared that Gao would be the capital city of their independent state. The dispirited, penniless and ill-disciplined Touareg rebel force had been given its comeuppance.  For the moment, the dream of an independent Touareg state lies dead in the water.  Since their defeat in Gao, word has it that MNLA leaders have been contemplating abandoning their erstwhile uncompromising demand for total independence, and talking to representatives of the African Union, ECOWAS and yes, even Mali itself, about creating an autonomous Touareg-dominated homeland in the north east, modeled on the state of Quebec in Canada, which would enjoy considerably greater economic, political and cultural freedoms than ever before but would, crucially, remain a part of Mali.  The theory goes that the MNLA might be able to rescue the situation, and their dignity, if they ally themselves with the rump of the Malian army and take the fight to the Islamists.  That way, they’ll get the African Union, ECOWAS, France, the US firmly behind their cause, but the price they’ll have to pay is the abandonment of their long-cherished dream of an independent Azawad.  “The rout of the Touareg of the MNLA in Gao is a good thing,” an Algerian DRS agent recently told the French magazine, Jeune Afrique. “Now, the ex-rebels will turn to the Malian army.”   In other words, Azawad is dead. Algeria is happy. Mission accomplished.

So what about the big Algeria – Terrorist collusion theory?  Did Algeria plan the Islamist hi-jack of the Touareg cause?  Did it mastermind it?  Did it finance it?  Or did events just spin themselves out with glorious serendipity?  Anybody who knows the long dark history of Islamic insurgency in Algeria also knows that the Algerian government is no stranger to the manipulation of Islamist movements.  There are examples aplenty of government collusion with terrorists from the bloody civil war of the 1990s.  The man who created the GSPC, the fore-runner of AQIM, Hassan Hattab, was an ex-Paratrooper in the Algerian army.  Amari Saïfi, aka Abderrazak ‘El Para’, who carried out the kidnapping of 32 western tourists in southern Algeria in 2003, the event that launched the kidnapping game in the southern Sahara, was not only an ex-Paratrooper, but also a special forces operative, trained in the USA and Russia, who spent time as a bodyguard to General Khaled Nezzar, one of Algeria’s most powerful men.  Iyad Ag Ghali made excellent links with the Algerian army and the DRS in the 1990s, as leader of the Touareg rebellion and in the 2000s, as a hostage-negotiator of choice.  So there’s form to support the theory.  But, unfortunately, no really hard evidence.  Hard solid copper-bottomed evidence, that’s what we hacks in the media need.  I do wish that Toumast Press, rather than just reporting hearsay, would distribute a few discreet cameras with telephoto lenses to friendly, and courageous, operatives in Gao and Timbuktu, so that they can capture any collusion between Algeria and the Islamists on film and post it on You Tube for the world to see.  Easier said than done, I know.  But we need that evidence, guys, and we need it badly.

In the end, whether Algeria has been playing chief puppeteer in northern Mali or whether fate has simply smiled on its parade, the recent turn of events has delivered almost everything that Algeria could have wished for.  Somehow, and I admit I don’t exactly know how, they have played an absolutely masterful game.

Well, that unity has now completely broken down.  MUJAO is a strange beast.  It first appeared last November, when it claimed responsibility for kidnapping 3 European NGO workers in a Polisario run refugee camp near Tindouf in the far south west of Algeria.  Next, it blew up a police training academy in the southern Algerian city of Tamanrasset.  Then, in April, MUJAO kidnapped 7 Algerian diplomats from the Algerian consulate in Gao and is still holding them captive.  After the fall of Gao in early April, it quickly became apparent that MUJAO, which initially seemed to be a largely Mauritanian group lead by a Franco-Moroccan man, had formed an alliance with the Tilemsi Arabs of the Gao region, many of whom are lynchpins of the drugs trafficking game in the far east of Mali: men like Sherif Ould Tahar, Mohammed Rouggy and their father-in-law Mohammed Ould Mataly, all from the Bourem / Almoustrat area, where the biggest of the famous ‘Flight Cocaine’ jets landed and disgorged its immense cargo of drugs a few years ago.

All these men have had close links with AQIM in the past.  Maybe they struck a deal with MUJAO to defend Arab interests in the Gao region and to block NMLA and therefore Touareg power there.  I’ve also heard that most of the MUJAO fighters are black Africans, and that Boko Haram elements have also been involved in the fighting in Gao these past few days.  And since, unlike the NMLA, the avowed aim of the Islamists in this struggle has never been to divide Mali in two, but rather to impose Sharia law on the whole of Mali, perhaps MUJAO have become strange bedfellows with Ganda Koy and Ganda Izo, the two Songhoi militias who have long been fighting any attempt by Touareg further north to secede from Mali and create an independent state of Azawad.  The footage of black Songhoi residents of Gao taking to the streets and denouncing the NMLA while chanting the name of Ansar Eddine, could be the result. We have to allow however for the fact that the NMLA have been very lax in the past few months when it comes to maintaining law and order.  A few days ago, the NMLA leadership even met with the youth of Gao and reportedly apologised for these mistakes.

Whatever is behind this latest fighting, all pretence that the NMLA and Ansar Eddine / MUJAO / AQIM can live together and build the new Azawad together has gone.  And the lie that the Touareg  nationalist movement and the Islamic terrorists are in alliance with each other, which has been peddled by Mali for the past five years or more, has also bitten the dust.  The NMLA teamed up with Ansar Eddine when it was convenient to do so. Now, as expected, they’re at loggerheads. And the NMLA claim that it has 10,000 well armed soldiers who could easily take on the Islamists has also been proved false.  The Islamists are obviously better equipped and better trained than the NMLA, hence the victory of the MUJAO over the NMLA unit who were guarding the Governor’s residence in the centre of Gao.  But I would guess that the NMLA fighters have a clearer and better understanding of why they are fighting. They have retreated to the Firhoun base on the outskirts of Gao and are likely to attack again.  The outcome of this struggle still very uncertain.

And the death of One-eyed Jack, if it is true, is a victory not only for the NMLA but for all those who wish to see that unholy alliance of Al Qaida and drugs / weapons / people traffickers in the southern Sahara crushed and destroyed. Belmokhtar has been smuggling, kidnapping, killing in the southern Sahara since the early 1990s, when he was the GIA’s ‘man in the south’ and something of a Bin Laden, Scarlet Pimpernel and Al Capone, all rolled into one.  He was a desert boy, born and bred in Ghardaia, Algeria, who was “seduced”, in his own words, by jihad in his teenage years and travelled to Afghanistan to receive training in Al Qaida camps near the city of Jalalabad. It was in Afghanistan, so he claimed, that a piece of Russian shrapnel robbed him of an eye. Belmokhtar returned to Algeria in the early 1990s and became the don of the southern Saharan smuggling game, forging strong links with arms, drugs and people smugglers and befriending various Touareg and Berabiche tribal leaders in the process. He even married one, or possibly several Berabiche Arab girls from Timbuktu and once declared that he would like to ‘retire’ to northern Mali when his hustling days are over. He also joined the GIA in the early 1990s and then left with Hattab to become part of the GSPC.
By the turn of the millennium, Belmokhtar had risen up the ranks to become one of the GSPC’s leading emirs in the Sahara.  He collaborated with El Para on refocussing GSPC operations further south, but the pair soon fell out, jealous of each others’ power. Whereas El Para ventured into ill-advised waters by seeking to buy arms in Chad and eventually got himself caught and extradited back to Algeria, Belmokhtar, with unfailing shrewdness of judgement, evaded capture for more than two decades. The French security services called him l’inssaisisable, the ‘uncatchable’. Whilst Belmokhtar’s rival at the top of AQIM’s Saharan hierarchy, Abou Zeid, is reviled for his brute cruelty and appetite for chopping the heads off his kidnap victims, Sahara watchers often regarded the one-eyed Monsieur Marlboro with a grudging respect, recognising his relative restraint in the treatment of hostages. Many are also convinced he’s only in it for the money and always has been. “Belmokhtar will kidnap, rob or smuggle anything for anyone,” a silver-haired Saharanist once said to me, “so long as the price is right.”

Well, as they say, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.  Let’s hope Belmokhtar is no more!

Andy Morgan, 28th June 2012.

A few days ago, on Friday March 23rd, I managed to reach an MNLA fighter called Intarhia on his satellite phone.  When I called, he was in a 4×4 that was being driven across open desert, seemingly at top speed going by the incessant roar that formed a trying backdrop to our conversation.  This a transcript of our interview:

Andy:           How are things where you are right now?

Intarhia:         For us, things are going very well, hamdullilah.  We are to the north of Timbuktu.  A week ago we liberated certain zones in the region of Timbuktu, certain cercles [administrative regions] and towns.  Thirteen towns and villages in all.

A:         So not Timbuktu yet.  That must be the next stage mustn’t it?  The city itself?

I:         Yes, Timbuktu will probably be the next place.  In a few days, inshallah, all of Azawad will be free.

A:         Will it be a big challenge to Timbuktu for you and your men?

I:         Not, it’s not something big.  It’s a little thing.

A:         When you have liberated a village or a town, what’s your strategy?  Do you leave some men there to keep order?

I:         Yes indeed, that’s what we do.  We leave a certain number of men to ensure the security of the village and maintain order, and to help the population, raise the flag.  That’s it.

A:         And do you take care of humanitarian issues too?  If there are civilians in distress who don’t have enough to eat etc, do you help?

I:         Yes, indeed.  We help in any way we can.

A:         Will the events in Bamako in the last few days and the coup d’état, will they help or hinder your cause?

I:         The coup d’Etat…if they accept talks for independence, then there’s no problem.  But not if they act like the last President, like the old government.

A:         But would you prefer to have ATT or Capt. Sanogo in front you.  Who’s better, or is it all the same to you?

I:         They’re the same for us.

A:         So would you say that the morale among your fellow fighters is very good right now?

I:         Yes our fighters have good morale.  They also have the capacity.

A:         And how do find supplies, food and drink and all that.  Is it hard or can you organise that aspect easily?

I:         No, we organise that very easily.  Very easily.  Even before, back in history, we were able to organise our struggle, our combat, everything.

A:         So you find enough to eat whilst you’re on the road.  People give you stuff to eat.  Is that how it works?

I:         We have everything we need.  We have food, we have fuel, we have everything.  We need nothing, except Azawad today.  Liberation, that’s all we need!

A:         Yes, of course.  No, I just want to know where it comes from.  Is it sourced locally, or does it come from elsewhere?  From Algeria?

I:         It comes a bit from everywhere.  Even neighbouring countries know that we need help today, financial help and all that.  Even Mali is looking for help, so all the more reason for us, the army of Liberation, to do so.

A:         Are there Arab and Songhai fighters with you at the moment?

I:         Yes, all the ethnicities of the Azawad are with us.  Even the Peulh.

A:         So I just want to talk about certain accusations that have been leveled in the international press, to get your opinion on them.

I:         Yes?

A:         They say that you are mercenaries who have come back from Libya. What do you have to say to that?

I:         We aren’t mercenaries.  We’re here for the liberation of Azawad, which has been occupied for more than 52 years by the enemy.  We aren’t mercenaries.  He who thinks like that…it’s a lie.  France came here to our home, to take over these lands. Then she handed them over to Mali in the 1960s.  And until today, France hasn’t been able to come back and separate us again.

A:         And people also say that you’re in alliance with Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.  What have you got to say about that?

I:         AQIM is a project that comes from our neighbouring countries.  It’s their project.  It’s their way of managing and controlling the situation here.  But they can’t do anything against us.  Yes.  They see an empty territory, like Azawad, and they want to insert their project into Azawad.  And Mali says nothing.  We’re here suffering in Azawad thanks to their project.  Yes.

A:         And so, after the liberation of the country, do you intend to also liberate the country from Al Qaida?  That’s to say to chase Al Qaida out from Azawad?

I:         Yes indeed. Yes, indeed.  When we liberate the country we will chase all our enemies from Azawad.  ALL our enemies!

A:         OK.  But there’s still the status of Iyad Ag Ghali, and his militia that is called Ansar Eddine.  It’s creating plenty of confusion here in the west.  Because people hear that Iyad wants to impose Sharia law in Azawad.  What do you think of all that?

I:         Iyad is an ally, an ally of the movement, that’s all. But if he does something like that he’ll be chased away.  We won’t even recognize him anymore.

A:         OK. So that’s to say that you’re together for the liberation, but you’re not together when it comes to imposing Sharia law and that kind of thing of afterwards.

I:         No. Everything decreed by the UN, the United Nations, and in accordance with all UN law, yes?

A:           Yes, but just to stay with Iyad…sorry to repeat the question.  So Iyad is an ally.  We can understand that.  But his project is rather Islamist and people in the west and international opinion, are very confused by that.  Because you say you’re not allied to Al Qaida but after all, Iyad is seeking a state governed by Sharia etc etc.  The effect of that situation outside the desert is a general confusion..

I:         Yes.  It’s the complicity of two countries, the complicity of various countries that has put Iyad in that situation and imposed him on our movement.  But we couldn’t care less.  If he carries on like that, we’ll just chase him out of the country.   He’s against everyone.  He’ll become like Mali, or Al Qaida or anyone else.  Azawad will be liberated from all those enemies.

A:         And what do you think about the situation with Colonel Alhaji Ag Gamou [Head of the Malian armed forces in the north east of the country - Ed].  Because after all he is a Tamashek like you and people who don’t know the culture very well think that it’s a contradiction for him to fight against his Tamashek brothers.

I:         Yes, indeed.  We know him. He’s a brother.  And what worries us a lot is that he is with the enemy and he’s shooting at us.  The law doesn’t allow him to do that.   He will be captured and he’ll be judged under the law.

A:         Can you say how many vehicles and men are with you at the moment in your unit?

I:         In our unit…we’re divided into bases.  In this base here there are 400 vehicles, in one single base.  In all we have ten bases.  400 multiplied by ten, makes 4,000 vehicles.  All-terrain vehicles.

A:         And that’s in the Timbuktu sector?

I:         Yes, that’s in the Timbuktu sector.

A:         And in that sector Mohammed Ag Najm is the commander right?

I:         Yes, indeed.

A:         And so I just wanted to ask if you wanted to say something that I can transmit to the public here in Europe.

I:         Only that we, the Azawadians, the Africans who live in Azawad, we need our liberty, that’s all.  Please convey that to the people of Europe.  We’ll never stop until we have our independence, even if we have to go to Bamako, or to Kayes.  We’ll penetrate that far, just to have our independence.  The world mustn’t think that there’s Al Qaeda here with us, and all that stuff.  We have absolutely no alliance with Al Qaida, or with any other rebel movement.  The only thing that’s important is the liberation of Azawad.

A:         OK, thanks.

Cowering under a statue called ‘Belgium Bringing Civilisation to The Congo’, one of four large golden effigies in the entrance of hall of The Royal Museum of Middle Africa in Tervuren near Brussels, there’s a sculpture depicting a miserable African native, naked and blatantly ‘savage’ in the estimation of the colonial artist who fashioned it. Baloji, one of the most innovative rappers and video producers to have emerged from Africa in recent years, loiters next to this unseemly pair before our interview, tall and pensive in a two-piece suit of dark blue plaid, a peach pink shirt and elegant Puma trainers.  It’s a telling trinity: Europe the pompous ‘father’, Africa the down-trodden ’son’ and Baloji, the holy ghost or ‘super sorcerer’, the meaning of his name in Swahili, standing there all cool and dapper, like an embodiment of a young and creatively ambitious Africa which is ready to consign the cruel nonsense of colonialism and post-colonialism to the vaults of history where they belong.

Baloji is due to start filming his next video, a radical Africanisation of the Marvin Gaye song ‘I’m Going Home’, in the endless vaults of the Tervuren Museum itself, a scary place full of stolen fetishes and serried ranks of game trophies where irony lurks mischievously like a grimacing ghost monkey.  Baloji has even persuaded the Museum to part-fund the filming, a monumental feat in itself.  But that’s Baloji in a nutshell. Few other African artists have demonstrated such bone-headed tenacity in the face of indifferent labels, managers and public servants in their relentless drive for quality, innovation and creative power.  “What takes two weeks for Kanye West, takes me a year,” he says.

Once a member of Starflam, one of Belgium’s most successful hip hop crews, Baloji has been ploughing his own furrow for the past five years. He produced his first solo opus ‘Hotel Impala’ in 2007 and is currently limbering up for the worldwide release of his new album, ‘Kinshasa Succursale’.  It’s an ambitious attempt to marry hip hop with an glittering casket of African and African disapora styles, from mellifluous soukous through snaky funk and bumping ragga to the raw and rasping sounds of traditional Congolese music. It hits you a bit like Congo’s answer to The Beatle’s ‘White Album’, one of Baloji’s all time favourites.  Several tracks, including the other-worldly ‘Karibu Ya Bintou’, which rides an alien riff by Kinshasa’s finest, Konono No.1, are unlike anything that has ever come out of Africa’s musical imagination.

But it’s Baloji’s videos that reveal the true extent of man’s energies and creative power.  Self-funded, filmed on location in The Congo by the Belgian directors Spike & Jonze and cameraman Nicholas Karakatsanis, his clips for ‘Independence Cha Cha / Le Jour d’Après’ and ‘Karibu Ya Bintu’ are like mini masterpieces, short stories in celluloid, that draw power from Baloji’s fascination with cinema and photography (his cousin Sammy Baloji is a famous Congolese photographer).  Names like Almodovar, Jarmusch, Ken Loach and Francis Ford Coppola trip lightly from his tongue, with enthusiasm rather than pretence.

He was born Baloji Tshiani in Lubumbashi, south eastern Congo, in 1978, the product of an indiscreet liaison between a rich businessman and a hotel chambermaid.  At the age of three he was sent to live in Belgium, first in Oostende and then in the grim mining town of Liege, with his step family.  When Baloji was seven, his father lost most of his assets in an ethnic war that ravaged the east of Congo, and promptly disappeared from his life.  “Every day I wondered where he was,” Baloji says. “He was my only link with my own blood.”

I ask what it would have been like to meet the ten-year-old Baloji?  “Horrible,” he replies with a rueful laugh.  “I distanced myself from my family.  I was angry and aggressive. I failed all my tests at school, so they considered me retarded.”  He began to run with the Sicilian hoodlums of the Liege ‘hood, getting up to no good.  “Worse than that, I just had nothing to loose.”  He ended up in a special school for delinquents run by nuns, but said goodbye to formal education at the age of 15.  “In fact, I learned everything with the nuns,” he claims without irony.

Then rap came and saved him from the worst.  Thanks to his brothers, who danced professionally with the band Technotronic of ‘Pump Up The Volume’ fame, he discovered American

Baloji in the main lobby of the Musée Tervuren. (c) Andy Morgan 2011.

and then French rap.  Tonton David and the Marseille crew I Am where huge early influences. They taught him that his flow needn’t be dumb and simplistic.  “This was the first time I heard music that talked about people like me and my mates,” he tells me.  His first rap outfit, Les Malfrats Lingquistiques (‘The Linguistic Hustlers’), morphed into Starflam and Baloji became something of a Belgian hip hop heartthrob.  Meanwhile, living above a legendary record store called Caroline Music in Liège did wonders for his musical education. “I heard everything…PIL, Kraftwerk, Queens of the Stone Age, The Smiths…those guys really helped me.”

As grim, grey and racist as life on the cold plains of Belgium could be, Baloji can thank his adoptive country for his broad musical education and eclecticism, which is almost unique in the African music sphere.  Until recently, however, he hated soukous, the Congolese-born gold standard of post-independence pan-African pop.  “For me it was the worse music in the world,” he tells me.  Nonetheless, when he received a three page letter from his mother out of the blue, in 2007, his Congolese heritage came back to into the foreground of his life with a vengeance.  “She alluded the fact that I had been sent to Oostende as a child,” Baloji says. “To the city of Marvin Gaye. That’s how I discovered his song ‘I’m Going Home’”  The song seemed portentous and it spurred Baloji to return to his roots and record an album, a kind of soundtrack without a film, that would tell his mother what his life had been like over the past twenty years.  That’s how ‘Hotel Impala’ was born.

Baloji went ‘home’, to the Congo, to give the record to his mother in person.  He met her in a restaurant in Lubumbashi, dressed “like a little prince.”  But his mother couldn’t understand why he wasn’t a rich and successful careerist, like his father had been, rather than the struggling musician that she saw before her.  The meeting was a disaster, and Baloji is still working hard to build bridges.

“I want to make music that is very African, and very modern,” Baloji tells me.  “You have to be proud of who you are.  Rappers sample Bob James, Curtis Mayfield etc, but it means more when Talib Kewli or Kanye West samples them because that’s their heritage.  But we Africans also have an interesting heritage, which has a richness and a diversity that is huge and under-exploited.  We can also go deep into it and make it modern, celebrate its value, just like the Americans..”

It needed a special of sorcerer to conjure up that mix of heritage, modernity and blistering lyrical flow…a baloji perhaps, tall, dapper and fearlessly stubborn.

Andy Morgan. (c) 2011

First published in The Observer, UK – November 2011.

When I ask Danyel Waro whether he attaches any symbolic meaning to this fiery expansion he gives me a shy, slightly nervous sidelong smile, unsure whether I’m being entirely serious and answers, “Ahh, well. Yes, in a way. The lava makes the country grow and its image is growing too. But its geology is extraordinary. Really superb.”

Waro should know. The smallholding in the rural community of Le Tampon where he was born, raised and still lives is no more than fifteen miles due west of Le Piton’s smoking crater. He came into the world with russety straw-coloured hair, a coco rouge in local Creole parlance, and island lore has it that the redheads of La Réunion’s uplands have hair tainted by volcanic lava.  But above all, there’s no one alive who’s done more to expand the reputation of La Réunion and put this small clod of lush green vegetation and soaring volcanic peaks on the musical map.

Fans the world over venerate the passion of Waro’s performances and the spiritual, almost sacred intensity of his music; its raw simplicity, trance-inducing power and wild rhythmic joy. Those who can speak Creole, or maybe just French at a pinch, also attest to his sublime skills as a poet, storyteller, philosopher and social commentator.  To many Réunionnais he is simply an island hero, a local boy from the wrong side of the tracks made good on a global scale, a musical champion who for over thirty years has fought their fight for the right to be different, to be proud of their unique mongrel culture, to be happy with who they are. And when he squirms apologetically every time such accolades are heaped, they love him even more.

Despite having half a dozen acclaimed albums to his name, a clutch of gongs including the 2010 Womex Artist Award and an Academie Charles Cros “Coup de Coeur”, alongside decades of touring in mainland Europe and beyond, Waro had never visited the UK until last summer.  His afternoon workshop at the WOMAD Festival in Charlton Park may have been slightly less intense than the full blown show he was to give on the main stage later the same evening, which for those lucky enough to see it, was one of the highlights of the Festival.  But it was enthralling nonetheless.  When it had finished, I sat awkwardly in the back stage tent while Waro stripped off his sweat-drenched t-shirt and prepared himself, with quick considerate movements, to answer my questions. It was the fourth and final installment of an interview that had been in progress, off an on, since April.

Our very first meeting took place in a hotel lobby on the left bank of the Seine in Paris. I had noted the time of our meeting incorrectly on my scrawny Parisian diary sheet and was consequently an hour late for the interview, a mistake that would have caused a reaction of glum annoyance, even anger, in most other busy artists. Understandably so. Waro however didn’t show even a hint of short temper, treating my misdemeanor with the insignificance it deserved in the great scheme of things. After my profuse apologies, we made small talk, mostly about his recent trip to India. Very quickly enthusiasm warmed up his answers as he talked about his meetings with Tamils, and his desire to get to know Tamil culture better in view of its importance in the cultural weave of his island home.

Out in warm spring sunshine on the Left Bank, Notre Dame glowing like a honeycomb ahead of us, I was able to take the measure of the man. His physical presence was engagingly eccentric; small, thin and wiry with puffs of chaff-red and white hair bursting out from under his black bobble hat and sprouting like wise brillo from his chin, cheeks and ears. His face had an elfin shape that jutted into a strong and definite V at the point of his bushy chin.  He wore a pair of extra thick ‘national health’ glasses, behind which two warm and constantly moving eyes swam like brown pebbles in an animated stream of curiosity and enthusiasm.  He had the frame and manner of a workman, a person well used to digging the earth and chopping wood, not one to make a drama out of physical labour.

From the start, I liked his lack of dogma.  When I remarked on the irony that it was a priest who introduced the first black slave into La Réunion at the end of the 17^th century, Waro was quick to say that there were many priests who rejected the Catholic power and its shameful endorsement of the whole system of slavery.  His vision seemed to be unclouded by feelings of hatred or vengeance.  As we walked towards the metro, Waro’s answers to my questions were long, detailed and generous. I apologised once again for my shambolic timekeeping and he just apologised back. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I like talking about these things. In fact, I’m sorry if I talk too much.”

Down in the clanking growling depths of the RER, Waro told me a legend about the Piton de la Fournaise. “In the old days,” he said, “there was a woman, a slave trader, who owned a huge estate near St Paul. Her name was Madame Desbassayns. Some people see her as a very good person, but that’s the Catholic view. For others, she was the devil. There are those who believe that she’s still living inside the volcano, in that hell. From time to time she wakes up, and the volcano erupts.”

Before Madame Desbassayns and her kind turned La Réunion into yet another colonial slave economy producing natural ‘highs’ like sugar, coffee and spices to satisfy European cravings, it was just an empty fertile volcanic slab in the Indian Ocean, thirty miles long by twenty wide, about 120 miles east of Madagascar and 6,500 miles distant from France. The first settlers arrived in the decades after 1642 when the island was claimed by the Kind of France as his personal possession and renamed Île Bourbon. They were French adventurers, fearless and resilient men from Brittany and Picardie; soldiers, carpenters, masons, surgeons, chancers, sometimes even renegades or bandits on the run from the law. Among them was a Monsieur René Hoareau from Meneville in Picardie, the ancestor of the many Hoareaus or Waros who now inhabit the island.

Some of these first migrants of fortune married black Malgache women, not slaves but free women of African birth, from the French trading post at Fort Dauphin in Madagascar.  Danyel Waro takes pains to underline this fact to me. “They were free spirits,” he repeats, with eager emphasis. “Pioneering women. It was a new society, before the real beginnings of slavery. There was this first intermingling of Indian, Malgache and French that lasted about thirty years, and then slavery arrived with the Compagnie des Indes (The French East India Company) and there was a new workforce, mostly African and Malgache. The first 500 Réunionnais are well known, their names, which boats they arrived on, everything. Then afterwards, the slaves just arrived in the form of loads, like animals, and they were nameless.”

The essential bastard nature of La Reunion is something that Waro endorses with insistent zeal throughout our various conversations. The island is without doubt a miniature rainbow ‘nation’ with a scrabble-ready collection of richly hued Creole words to describe its various ‘tribes’; kaf (black African, from Arabic kafir meaning ‘unbeliever’), Malbar (anyone of central Asian descent, after the Malbar coast, where the first Indian arrivals on the island came from), yab or ti blan (small time poor white farmer), Malgache (anyone from Madagascar), Komor (anyone from the Comoros), Sinwa (Chinese), Zarabe (Arab or Muslim) and Zoreil (wealthier French landowning or administrative class).  The fact that all these ethnic groups coexist on their tiny island in relative peace, each with their own faiths, rituals, feast days, music and food, at times separate, at times combining and mingling, is astonishing. It reveals a shared sense of belonging and destiny that Danyel Waro holds in deep affection and praises in his music time and again.

In fact, he’s turned it into a kind of creed, which he calls batarsité, (lit. ‘bastardy’) which also happens to be the name of one his most popular albums, released in 1994.  A full-length documentary about Waro’s life released in 2008 and directed by Thierry Hoareau, a relation of some kind no doubt, is entitled Fier Bâtard or ‘Proud Bastard’.

When I ask Waro about racism in La Réunion he’s ready with his answer: “Our reality is deeply mixed but the conscience doesn’t always follow that.  Up in the head there’s always that desire to be pure, pure white maybe, but pure Indian or pure black as well. That’s why I talk about batarsité. It’s my way of saying let’s look at ourselves, in the mirror, look at what we desire. We’re just as mixed in our blood as we are in our culture, despite appearances. I always say that I’m made up of Indianité, kaffitude, Malgachitude, all of that.  Whether I like it or not, it’s already done inside me.”

I can’t help feeling however that there’s something else behind Waro’s words, a more personal struggle, and it has to do with the fact that he has adopted what was originally a black African form of music as his own, a music spiced with Asian flavours – mizik kaf i malbar to use the local parlance – that was despised and hidden away in the recesses of La Reunion’s conscience like something wicked and shameful right up until the late 1960s.  Then it was ‘discovered’ by a whole generation of young Réunionnais musicians and artists, both white and black, who turned it into the soundtrack of their struggle for autonomy and independence.  So in effect, like the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and Eminem, Waro has taken a style of music that wasn’t his by birthright and fashioned it into something new. But Waro’s whole point is that, thanks to the island’s unique blurring of racial and cultural dividing line, this music is in fact his own. It is his birthright as a Réunionnais and a ‘proud bastard’. The music in question is maloya.

Waro never heard any maloya until he was eighteen.  He was born in 1955 in a country shack with three acres but no electricity or running water, about 600 metres above the seaside town of St Pierre, with wide commanding views of fields, volcanoes and the distant sea.  This was land that had been given to poor white farmers many decades before to remove them from the more fertile regions below, which the powerful landowning classes claimed for themselves. Apart from a desire to grab all the best agricultural soil, those same landowners feared the hostility of any potential alliance between poor white farmers and the poor blacks or Indians who provided the bulk of the labour on the big plantations.  It was deemed prudent to send the yabs up-country and thereby avoid hope of solidarity among the oppressed.

Waro’s father had no time for music, poetry or any frivolities of that nature.  “He grew up in austerity and obscurity,” says Waro. “He had a really difficult childhood and that gave him this rigorous mentality.  But it was apt as well.  We couldn’t just hang around. We ate what we grew; maize, pulses, beans, potatoes and all kinds of root vegetables, which we also fed to the pigs and chicken. And all that doesn’t grow by itself.  So every day, before and after school we cut cane, tilled, hoed, weeded. It was all about rigour, and that rigour has given me many things. So I don’t complain.”

I try and imagine Waro’s childhood in the soil and dust, the crystalline air and unrelenting heat of the high Réunionnais plains and a kind rural epic, a cross between Steinbeck, Faulkner and The Waltons, set in the Indian Ocean, comes onto my mental screen.  No doubt the truth was more mundane, and more exotic still.

“Our house was cramped,” Waro remembers, “and I shared my bed with my four brothers, but I had acres of fields to run around in to, so it wasn’t too bad.” He suffered from diphtheria, which was often fatal at that time, and his mother vowed to the Virgin Mary to dress him in white and blue for five years if She would just spare his life.  “By their faith, their love, their healing, my mother and godmother cleaned out my throat and saved me,” he later told the French journalist François Bensignor. “So I’m a bit miraculous. And now my throat dictates my existence. That’s the miracle!”

Waro has hinted in interviews that his father occasionally drank too much rum and became abusive to his wife and children. This is probably the source of Waro’s lifelong aversion to alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana, all of which are party staples on the island. He assures me that both he and his group are entirely ‘clean’ in that sense.

“Maloya has so often been lumped together with a bottle of rum, but that association doesn’t interest me,” he says with conviction. “It’s one of the reasons why the music was just chucked in a sack in the past, like a piece of garbage belonging only to the poorest, or stupidest, or blackest.  If you love what I sing, you don’t have to drink to appreciate it. That’s what I say.” It should be added that despite everything, the memory of his father inspires great love and respect in him now. “I owe him more than one song,” he says with tenderness.

Waro sang in the fields and listened to the Creole tales and riddles told by friends and neighbours. It was a fecund trove of language, which the absence of radio and TV only made richer and more vital. He also listened to the political views of his father, who was a staunch communist and supporter of the Parti Communiste Réunionnais, or PCR, which was founded in 1959 by the visionary Paul Vergès.  “I grew up with politics,” Waro says. “And with the communist and autonomist parties that were more or less forbidden then. I spent my youth in a climate of resistance.”  Later, as a teenager, Waro organised strikes at his Lycée.

Music was only a distant presence in the house. There was a radio, but it was only there for the news.  Nonetheless, Waro felt the magnetism of the Tamil drums, the Creole songs and the whole kaleidoscope of the island’s musical life that went on around him, undervalued by most.

When his adolescent hormones started to kick in, he listened spellbound to his sister’s 78s of Georges Brassens, the French balladeer.  “I remember I would listen to the same songs over and over again, copying out the lyrics and doing everything to enter his world, which was a little anarchic but sensual at the same time,” says Waro. “To hear him talk about women, about sex too, with that kind of non-misogynistic misogyny, that interested me greatly.”

Brassens was the big influence in Waro’s formative years, and apart from the island sounds all round, Brassens is still number one for him.  “I’ve never listened to much music except Brassens. I’m not a great music listener, nor an avid reader. I don’t want to be greedy and listen, listen, listen. That’s a kind of pollution.  I just want to take things in small doses, what I like, when I Iike, and make my own sauce from it.”

In 1973, at the annual Festival of the Communist Party, known as the Fête Temoignage, where the eighteen year old Waro was working as a young volunteer, he saw a performance by Firmin Viry, one of the gran moun, or ‘great people’ of maloya. The experience changed his life changed forever.

They say that the word maloya comes from the Malgache maloy aho, which means something like ’speaking your heart’ or ‘telling your truth’. It also means ‘great sorcerer’ in Zimbabwe or ‘incantation’ and ‘sorcery’ in Mozambique. In other words, it’s always been a very potent word.  And now it also describes a music originally played by the black underclass of La Réunion, most often to accompany ancestor-worshiping rituals called servis kabaré which lasted all night or even several days. With its huge pounding roulèr drums of wood and beef hide, its clattering pikèr bamboo percussion, its shuffling kayamb or wooden ‘tray’ of cane stalks, its zinging bob or one-stringed arc and gourd, and its keening, yearning call and response vocals, maloya was designed to invoked a state of trance in devotees, powerful enough to draw the spirit of the ancestors out of obscurity and into the here and now. According to the late Granmoun Lélé, another true original of the genre, those spirits have the power to grant their descendants a state of grace, to lighten their paths and their loads, to heal their sorrows and their broken bodies.  But in order for those ancestors to come, the maloya has to be sung with total sincerity and abandon, from the bottom of the singer’s heart.  Anything less, and the departed gran moun will just stay in heaven.

Like American gospel, Brazilian candomblé, Cuban santéria, Moroccan gnawa and Jamaican nyabhingi, maloya was originally a method of inducing well-being, joy and a sense of power through solidarity among the living, and between the living and the dead, whose spirits dance in the tropical night air. Its devotees were the descendants of slaves, a people who had been robbed of everything apart from their life on earth, their memory and their culture. And like all those other ‘African’ systems of belief and transcendence, maloya is a mongrel phenomenon. The original ancestor-worship ritual was supposedly imported from Madagascar, but it has since been nourished with music and ritual from India and other parts of Africa. Granmoun Lélé himself was an incarnation of these hybrid genetics.  His mother was kaf, with Somali, Comorian, Malgache and Zanzibari blood pulsing through her veins. She was baptised a Christian, and so was her son. His father was a malbar, a Hindu with roots in Tamil Nadu. He was a sculptor by trade whose job it was to renovate and maintain the masks and statuettes used in the Bal Tamoul, the sacred ritual theatre of the Tamil people which replayed scenes from the Ramayama epics.

When the PCR first started to programme Firmin Viry and his family troupe at political gatherings in the late 1960s, maloya was still a proscribed form of music, hidden away in the black shanty towns and worker’s quarters, reviled by the ruling French elite, who only tolerated its more romantic and quaintly folkloric cousin sega, another musical casserole in which African elements are mixed with the genteel quadrilles of the slave owning classes and the popular music of France and Europe.

Maloya was uncompromisingly black and possession of a roulèr or kayamb could earn you a stint in jail or maybe even a few lashes of the sabouk or slave-owner’s whip.  The noise of the all night servis kabarés was deemed intolerable, a public nuisance of the worse kind, by priests and ‘quality’ folk alike.  According to the likes of Michel Debré, French minister for overseas territories from 1960 to 1983, and a passionate supporter of Christian values and assimilation with France, maloya was only a vulgar reminder of slavery and the shame in La Réunion’s history. Moreover it was sung in Creole, an “absurd” folk language, which the elite deemed incapable of expressing deep emotions or civilised opinions. For them, maloya was best forgotten.

But that past and that language were precisely what the PCR and its supporters wanted to bring out into the open and unfurl. Their heroes were the maroons or slaves who escaped to the high hills and plains of La Réunion to find freedom from the brutality of the slave owners.  In the raw, unadorned lyrics of songs by Firmin Viry and Granmoun Lélé, they heard the whispers of that old renegade defiance, a cry of freedom, sung in Creole and rooted in a distant past that, far from being shameful, actually defined the real soul of La Réunion. Maloya was co-opted by the communists as a cultural insignia and a political weapon against old prejudice.

To the young Waro, Firmin Viry was a revelation. “I was standing next to Viry and his family when he was getting his roulèr ready, heating up his skins, getting ready to go on stage,” he remembers. “Seeing them play provoked a physical reaction in me.  I immediately wanted to take that music into my heart and soul.  After that I met and saw other singers like Granmoun Lélé or Le Rwa Kaf who became very important to me, but Firmin Viry is my model, that’s for sure.”  If you want to know where Waro’s pared down and pulsing style comes from, listen to Firmin Viry and Granmoun Lélé.

Waro fell in love with maloya and all that it stood for.  When I ask him to explain what the genre means him to him, to give me the non-ethnomusicological definition, his answer is redolent of that love. “It’s a philosophy. It’s a way of being. For me, maloya is the flower that was absent in my youth, the tenderness that I missed, the love that I needed. But it’s also resistance, defiance, because maloya’s African soul reached out and touched everything that was suppressed and forbidden and allowed it to feel whole, to harmonise itself.”

Waro joined Viry’s troupe on an occasional basis before putting together his own band of fellow agricultural workers. The first recorded gig under his own name was on December 27^th 1975. Waro was twenty years old. He’d just failed his baccalaureate. He was young, confused and maloya mad. The following year he was shipped over to France to do his military service, knowing all along that there was no way he would ever don a uniform, shoulder a gun and salute the tricouleur.  When he arrived in the ‘motherland’ he refused to join up and his defiant pacifism earned him a 22-month stint in the Centre de Détention d’Écouvres in Rennes.

Prison was a refuge, a space to reflect and seek answers to the questions blue-bottling in his mind. Waro spent his time writing poems, sending letters home and composing songs. One of them ‘Degaz Anou Vitnam’ (‘Get Out of Vietnam!’) appeared on his 2010 release Aou Amwin, a double CD of great invention and originality, which many consider to be Waro’s masterpiece. He also managed to pen a novel entitled Romans ékri dan la zol en frans (‘Novel written in gaol in France’), which was published on his release in 1978, with drawings by Kaniki.  It has been described as a kind of extended maloya poem, in which Waro rails against the enemies of independent Réunion, especially the despised Michel Debré. “Maloya nourished me during those years of prison,” he later told the Swiss journalist Elizabeth Stoudmann. “I had just discovered it when I was sent to Rennes. I didn’t sing inside, but I wrote a lot. I realised that I didn’t know La Réunion that well. I accepted prison as a retreat. I took stock.”

When Waro returned to Réunion in 1978, revolution was in the air. A whole new generation were proclaiming their Réunionnité and the need to break with the old colonial mindset. Writers and poets such as Boris Gamaleya, Anne Cheynet, Alain Lorraine, Georges Gauvin, Axel Gauvin and Carpanin Marimoutou, some who were staunchly communist, others wary of established political creeds, were forging a new Creole voice, pushing the once oral language into the domain of literature and written discourse. They saw their struggle paralleled in other parts of the old French Empire, especially the other Creole speaking islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, or parts of France such as Brittany or Occitania in Provence, where minority tongues that had once been smothered by the might of the language of Moliere were also undergoing a renaissance.

Musicians like Alain Peters, the doomed junkie hero of the new electrified ‘rock’ Maloya and groups such as Ziskakan, Baster, Sabouk, Ti Fock and Persée Poliss were starting to inject the old maloya of Firmin Viry, Granmoun Lélé and le Rwa Kaf with a new uncompromising zeal, a youthful taste for confrontation and revolt. Some veterans, like Viry himself, were shocked at the brash rock and reggae tones that began to be added to what had long been the relatively unchanging acoustic roots sound of maloya.  To him, such new hybrids might be music, but they weren’t maloya.

Danyel Waro may not have been shocked, but he showed little sign of wanting to be a musical iconoclast.  On his return home he started to make traditional maloya instruments for a living. There was huge demand for good roulèr drums, bobs and kayambs because most of these instruments had been confiscated during the previous decades. “I’ve been familiar with the kayamb since early childhood,” he told Elisabeth Stoudmann. “But in pieces. I come from the earth, from sugar cane, and I went back to the earth and sugar cane thanks to musical instruments.”

Waro also continued performing with his troupe and started frequenting various kabar ceremonies, dousing himself in their raw intensity and spectacle. He became a familiar figure at the kabar held by an old maloyèr called Granmoun Baba, eventually becoming part of his extended ‘family’ of musicians and friends. “His wife Madame Baba still carries on,” he tells me. “She’s 92 now and she performs the ceremony every year.”

Danyel Waro was now approaching his quarter century and experiencing important shifts in his political and creative philosophies. He was beginning to loose his taste for the rigid certainties of communism, with its central control, its dogmatic rationalism, its distrust of individualism and its veneration of great leader figures like Marx, Lenin and Mao.

“The idea of communism or socialism as a philosophy of sharing and social justice has remained with me,” he explains. “And I’m still against the capitalist profit motive because that’s where injustice, domination, abuse and lack of liberty stem from. But I’m also against the hoarding of power, against centralism. The problem with communism is that it claims to possess the truth because it has a good idea. That idea is equality, justice and wellbeing for all, and you line-up obediently behind that idea, but it belongs to someone, to a person, to a few people.  And lining up behind it you loose that personal liberty, which communism considers to be a bit of a bourgeois concept. If you’re against the top man, the great leader, you’re considered a kind of counter revolutionary. But I defend that freedom of expression, of seeking the truth.”

At the dawn of the 1980s, the island’s radical left was split into two camps; those who favoured autonomy but under the umbrella of the French nation (La Réunion had been a department of France since 1946, with the same supposed rights and privileges as any department of mainland France itself), and those who preferred a complete break with France and real independence.  For the latter, being part of France meant being subjected to an enduring French colonialist mindset, whose only ultimate interests lay in destroying genuine Réunionnais culture and assimilating the island into the superior certainties of the French state, French culture and the Catholic faith.  Waro was an indépendantiste, whereas the PCR favoured autonomy but fought shy of a complete break with France.

And so Waro left the purely political path of the committed activist, and forked off on his own artistic one. He reformed his troupe and started to perform regularly.  In 1981, the election of President Mitterrand and France’s first left wing government in two generations changed much in La Réunion, as it did throughout France and its dominions, sweeping away old and narrow-minded cultural restrictions and empowering creativity of all kinds at all levels. Maloya shook off its last few fetters and emerged into the open, free at last.  Kabars and concerts no longer had to be hidden away or officially sanctioned by the local prefecture.  The maloya inspired music scene blossomed like a desert after a flash flood, as did many other local Creole art forms.  Some have even called what happened a kind of Creole movida.  “The renaissance of maloya gave back a worth to all that African part of ourselves that had been devalued and hidden for centuries,” Waro says. “We won back a piece of ourselves.”

Waro had decided he was a musician, not a politician, and his music was maloya. But his passions continued to intermingle. He re-entered politics in the late 1990s, as member of the candidate list of the Nasyon Réyoné Dobout (‘Reunion Nation Stand Up!’) Party.  It won a meagre 0.77% of the island legislative elections in 1998.  Perhaps even the most hardened Réunionnais nationalists had to admit that without subsidies from France and the European Union, life on the island would be even harder than it already was.  Independence continues as a state of mind at best, albeit one that influences much of Waro’s creativity and philosophy to this day.

Meanwhile, Waro’s musical career developed in an eccentric fashion. His reputation at home and abroad grew steadily during the 1980s and 90s, eventually hoisting him up to the pinnacle of the new breed of maloya artists who started their careers in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  And yet, by 1990, even though Waro was touring places like Japan, only one meagre cassette of his music was available in Réunion.

The fact is that Waro still saw himself as a militant, of a creative musical kind. He instinctively shunned the whole machinery of musical production, of labels and press attachés, of

marketing and video clips.  He took this attitude despite the fact that it was the PCR itself that had kick-started the phonographic production of maloya when it released a series of LPs and singles by the likes of Firmin Viry in the late 1970s and 1980s.  But it wasn’t until Waro met Philippe Conrath, boss of Cobalt Records and the innovative artist-breaking Africolor festival in Paris, that he felt inclined to engage with the record industry. We must thank god and the ancestors that he did.

Meanwhile, the concert was Waro’s forum of choice and the only place where he felt a direct and meaningful relationship with his audience, without danger of distortion from third parties working for the profit motive.  That is perhaps why his concerts are so intense, so driven, so immediate and vital.

I ask Waro where this intensity comes from.  “It’s maloya,” he answers. “In the ritual, there’s this gradual crescendo of chants, and singing. Everyone is involved. Everyone is on the same level. There’s the soloist who starts the chant, there the instrumentalists behind him and then it progresses with chants and songs intensifying, the rhythm comes in, to make people dance, to give pleasure to the ancestors. For me it’s all of that.”

So are you trying to recreate the ritual, the servis kabaré?

“For me, when I’m in front of an audience, it’s all about trying to build something which kind of sacred, something powerful and deep. But then, I’m not trying to recreate the servis kabaré, no. When I compose my songs, and try to find the right words, I’m trying to create something that isn’t just partying for partying’s sake, or dancing for dancing’s sake.  It’s something with meaning, I don’t know what meaning, but something that touches people and touches me. I don’t even sing for others. I try to feel good myself. I often say it’s like bewitching…like casting a spell on myself. I don’t always get there of course, but that’s how I see it.”

There’s little doubt that music is still a form of activism for Waro. That explosive spirit of defiance and renaissance that gave birth to the new maloya in the late 1970s still infuses his recordings and shows. But when I spoke to him at WOMAD this year, when he seemed more relaxed, more forthcoming and effusive than during our previous conversations, I felt I was listening to a man who has achieved a new stability and philosophical tranquillity in his life.

“The place where I’m at peace is at home in Le Tampon,” he tells me. “I have to feel calm to create, write a song, and find the right words. I take something from every place I visit, I take emotions when I’m walking, from the light, from nature. I go to La Chapelle to hear the drums. I’m a bit of sponge in that way. But at the same time, I don’t want to take too much.”

There’s always that emphasis on words when Waro speaks about his art. Finding the right words is his holy grail. And in fact, if you look at his career, it’s the words that have soaked up the larger part of his creative energy. The music has stayed pretty much the same at its core, despite innovative forages into other styles and collaborations with musicians from France, Corsica, Morocco and elsewhere. The harmonies on last year’s Aou Amwin are also lusher, more experimental than before, thanks apparently to the input of Waro’s son Sami Waro and others. But the heart of the sound is still pure roots maloya with roulèr, pikèr, kayamb, triangle providing the warmth, and the heat.

As a creator, Waro is essentially a word man (he also happens to be a powerful and nimble vocalist). But he’s also been venturing slowly into a more wordless territory of pure spirit, beyond ideas, discourse and the Cartesian rationalism (his phrase, not mine) of his youth. The Chapelle he refers to in the answer above is the renowned Chapelle de la Misère, the ‘Chapel of Misery’, which is situated in St Paul, not far from his home. It’s run by the inspirational Daniel Singaïny, once a communist like Waro, but now a hugely respected community leader and spiritual guide. The main strands in his ritual are Hindu and Tamil – fire walking and sacrifice to the goddess Kali are staples – and his temple is extremely popular with working class Réunionnais.  Waro has been going there for about thirty years, but for most of that time his interest was musical, creative and cultural. Things have changed recently.

“I first did the fire walk a few years ago,” he tells me. “I had taken my time for many reasons, to do with my own feelings about ritual.  I took that path little by little, going to La Chapelle de la Misère to learn about Tamil culture, to lend a hand during the ceremonies, to play music and help. But now I’ve taken a step that’s a little more important. I’ve gone more deeply into the ritual, into the spiritual and religious side in a real sense. It’s no longer just a cultural thing, an appreciation. Today I actually take part in the ceremonies, I do my observances, my fast.”

This new implication in the realm of pure spirit has lead Waro to a new place in his life, a place that is more earthed and grounded. “It’s been a long time that I’ve been sorting things out. I can see clearly what’s worth keeping or not keeping in the political life and all the pressure groups I used to be part of, with the autonomists, the nationalists, the different collectives who were fighting the fight. What’s bad in me needed to be cleaned in order for me to be myself and become non-violent and genuinely tolerant. I don’t want to be revolutionary just for the word ‘revolutionary’. What interest me now is to really be. And being myself is being Indian as much as white as much as kaf as much as Malgache. In the end, I’m all those things. It’s about freedom in every sense of the word. Freedom to plant your own seeds, to value the tree next to your house that gives you shade, or the jackfruit that feeds you. It’s finding what’s essential in life. It’s about taking responsibility for myself, laying claim to myself and then getting beyond that struggle to a place where there’s no need to do those things anymore.  And there I feel at peace.”

Can a white country boy sing maloya?  Ladies and gentleman, please welcome Danyel Waro.

Andy Morgan. (c) 2011

First published in fRoots Magazine, UK – October 2011.

AfroCubism: Eliades Ochoa & Bassekou Kouyate eye to eye (c) Christina Jaspars

“The people of Africa have to suffer under the ever prevailing dogma that proclaims the superiority of one race over another and allows a man to be assassinated with impunity in the name of that superiority.”  With these words Che Guevara launched a passionate verbal assault on the “imperialists” who had plotted the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the founding father of independent Congo, and on the complicity of the United Nations in this crime. The date was December 11^th 1964.  The place was the General Assembly of the UN in New York.

There can little doubt that Lumumba’s death churned Che Guevara to the depths of his being. It provoked a complete change in his political and revolutionary career, one that lead, pretty much directly, to his death in the jungles of Bolivia less than three years later. The assassination spurred Che to leave Cuba and devote his considerable energy and charisma to the revolutionary struggle of the peoples of Africa and Latin America, but especially Africa. He even wrote a letter to his friend and fellow rebel Fidel Castro explaining himself: “I leave a nation which has adopted me like a son. I am taking the revolutionary spirit to new battlefields, along with the conviction that I continue to fulfill the most sacred of duties.”

Che was as good as his word. In the few months after his speech at the UN, he toured Africa, meeting and talking with the young and optimistic leaders of many a new African nation: Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, Ahmed Sekou Touré of Guinea, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.  He also met other men like Samora Machel from Mozambique and Agostinho Neto from Angola whose struggle for independence was far from over. Everywhere Che was welcomed as a hero, a mentor, a fellow freedom fighter, whose role in Cuba’s revolution was admired beyond words.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Africa had fallen head over heels for Cuban music. African independence was celebrated in a Cuban rhythm thanks the Congolese superstar Le Grand Kalle’s trans-continental hit ‘Independence Cha Cha’. In the 1960s the admiration deepened as Cuba’s new socialist regime began to send brigades of doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers to the new continent and invite young Africans who were hungry to learn and build their new nations, back to La Havana. The admiration for Cuba and its revolutionary leadership was intense.

Before disguising himself beyond recognition, adopting the Swahili nickname of ‘Tatu’, and disappearing into the jungle of eastern Congo to fight the Congolese army and its phalanxes of white European mercenaries, Che also met the young President Modibo Keita of Mali. The Cuban adventure in the eastern Congo was a demoralizing failure, but Che’s meeting with Keita was the reaffirmation of an alliance, a friendship and a sort of intercontinental love affair between the two nations.

Che in The Congo

Djelimady Tounkara, one of the greatest guitarists that West Africa has ever produced and a veteran of the Malian music scene, remembers those heady days of green nationhood back in the 1960s. “Our first President Modibo Keita was a communist and a socialist. He was a big friend of Fidel Castro. Their friendship resulted from their shared values. It’s thanks to that friendship that we learned about Cuban music.”

1965, the year of Che’s disastrous Congolese adventure, was a fateful one for third world politics in general. The colonial backlash was beginning to bite. But it was also fateful for more positive musical reasons. In the autumn of that year ten music students from Mali who were studying at the Alejandro Garcia Caturla Conservatory in La Havana de Cuba decided to form a band. They had already been in Cuba for almost two years, living in a svelte post-Bauhaus villa in the chic suburb of Siboney, learning the fundamentals of music theory, composition and arrangement whilst devoting their plentiful spare energy to some of Cuba’s other homegrown attractions, including women and rum.

It had been President Modibo Keita’s idea to send them to Cuba. As Bassekou Kouyate, maestro of the traditional Malian lute or ngoni, explains: “Our first President did everything he could to recruit these musicians and send them to Cuba to study music. Because, at that time, Malians were already great musicians, but they didn’t know how to compose and write down music.  So the President organised this scholarship so that people could learn how to write music down.”

As in so many other fields such as agriculture, industry, health and education, so it was in music. Africa had the raw material, the talent, the desire, the will to learn and build their fledgling nations. Cuba had the expertise. It was a perfect marriage. By the end of 1965, Boncana Maiga, a native of Gao in the far east of Mali and one of the most ambitious and talented of the ten Malians in La Havana, suggested to his friends that they had learned enough. Las Maravillas de Mali, “The Marvels of Mali”, was born.

The group had no intention of just aping the superior skills of the Cuban musicians around them. Their aim was to fuse the Manding, Songhai and other musical cultures of their native land with the rhythms, instruments and arrangements of their adoptive country.  The band performed their first gig on September 22^nd at the Guinean Embassy at La Havana. It was a huge success. A much fêted tour of the whole island, with performances in universities and sugar plantations, followed.  When they returned to Mali for a holiday in 1967, Las Maravillas de Mali played in front of chanting crowds on the Anniversary of Independence and then in front of President Keita at the Koulouba Palace. “The President was proud of us,” violinist Dramane Coulibaly told the French documentary maker Richard Minier. “We were proof of the country’s development potential.”

Maravillas de Mali CD Cover

The young Djelimady Tounkara was in Bamako to welcome the Maravillas de Mali home.  He had been a fan of Cuban music since the late 1950s, thanks to the GV series of 78rpm records. Back in the 1930s, the great depression in Europe and America spurred the executives at EMI’s His Master’s Voice label to seek out new markets. They began to repackage American Jazz and Cuban Son for West Africa. The first GV release, catalogue number G.V.1, was ‘El Manicero’ (‘The Peanut Vendor’) by Don Azpiazu and his Havana Casino Orchestra, recorded in New York City in 1930. The 250 or so G.V records that followed were distributed all over West Africa and became responsible for the birth of modern west African pop music in general, as well as pan-African styles such as Congolese rhumba, Soukous and Highlife in particular.  Thus misery and unemployment in the first world provoked a musical revolution in the third.

But the roots of the story go deeper…much much deeper. After all, the first African slaves arrived in Cuba in 1512. They were the cream of many different peoples: Yoruba, Manding, Kikongo, Carabali and Wolof and their sweat and tears created the wealth that made Cuba the richest place in the Americas by the mid 1800s. The sugar nobility treated their slave class with hatred and contempt, feelings which survived the revolution of 1959 and persist in the racism that still blights the Island today.  And yet, to quote the father of Afro-Cuban ethnology, Fernando Ortiz; “Without the black, Cuba would not be Cuba.”

“African blood is very close to all of us,” says Eliades Ochoa, leader of Grupo Patria. “Very close. We’re a mix of African and Spanish. I’ve always loved African music. More than Mali I would listen to the music of Senegal, the music of Congo, the rhythm of the tumbao drums and the music of Haiti.  All our rhythms are close to Africa.”

So by the time Boncana Maiga and his nine fellow musical ambassadors left Bamako in 1963, Mali had already been well and truly infected with Cuban rhythms.  But it wasn’t a distant relationship. Cuban musicians started to visit West Africa and Mali with great regularity, to the intense delight of young musicians like Djelimady Tounkara.

“I remember when Guillermo Portabales came,” he says. “It was in July 1961.  I was 16 years old and already performing with the National Orchestra – A Team.  I had my picture taken with Portables but then I lost the photo.  That’s what really hurts…ha ha ha.  After Portabales, Cachaito Lopez, the elder, came. I was jamming one day down at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Bamako, myself and the drummer Zani Diabate, and Cachaito stopped by to play with us.  He hired us on the spot!  And that same evening we played with him in front of the President.”

They kept coming; Johnny Pacheco, Ray Barretto, Ricardo Rey.  The world famous Orquesta Aragon came and stayed in Mali for two months, playing not only in the capital but also in regional cities like Mopti and Gao.  The Orchestra’s leader Rafael Lay took a shine to Djelimady Tounkara and to the kora player Sidiki Diabate, the father of kora maestro Toumani Diabate.  “He wanted to take us back to Cuba,” Djelimady remembers. “But President Keita was against it!””

Like most of his contemporaries, Djelimady Tounkara didn’t just revere Cuba for its music. “Fidel Castro was very popular at the time, because he exhorted us to work! Castro and Zhou En Lai of China. Castro came to Bamako and he used to walk all over town, in every neighbourhood, meeting people. I remember I was a member of the Popular Militia and once we were ordered to go to the Presidential Palace, very early one Sunday morning. Fidel Castro was there. We then walked 15 kilometres together to an agricultural centre run by the President, and Fidel Castro dug the fields with us, from the morning to the evening.  He dug with us, himself!  Because, as he used to say time and again, “Nobody will build your country for you. You mustn’t look towards the French or the British. Only you can build your own country.”  “Patriotismo!” that was his slogan.  Patriotismo!  Our rulers now, like our current president Amadou Toumani Touré, they were shaped by that time, by Modibo Keita.  And that’s how we were trained too.  When there’s work to be done, you must work. If you don’t know something, ask someone who knows. That’s what we learned.”

In some countries, like the Congo, the colonial backlash against the fiercely independent and unswervingly socialist governments of independent Africa began as soon as the ink was dry on the documents that brought colonial rule to an end. In Mali, the inevitable moment came at the end of 1968 when a young army lieutenant by the name of Moussa Traore, and a cabal of military plotters, many of whom had been trained at military academies in France, overthrew Modibo Keita in a coup.  Behind a smokescreen of fine words about honour and economic reform, Traore installed a dictatorship that was to rule with varying degrees of brutality for 23 years.

Las Maravillas de Mali were called back home in 1971 and, despite the immense fame they enjoyed throughout Mali and West Africa, were accused of communist sympathies and relegated to the lower rungs of Mali’s cultural bureaucracy. After several years, thanks to the support of the Minister of Culture and the Arts, Alpha Oumar Konaré, who was to take over from the hated Moussa Traore as President in 1991, Las Maravillas de Mali mutated into National Badema band with the incomparable singer Kasse Mady Diabate at the forefront of their new line-up.

Moussa Traoré’s government also accelerated a trend that had kicked off at independence. Despite the popularity of foreign music, not only Cuban son, but American jazz, French musette and Spanish Flamenco, the new leaders of west Africa urged, even ordered their artists and musicians to embrace their own traditions. It was the era of africanité or afro-centricity. Sekou Touré of Guinea was a pioneering force in this trend.

“I remember when our National Orchestra played with an orchestra from Guinea,” Djelimady Tounkara mused with a smile. “They all arrived in military uniforms and sang this very African song for us. There we were still playing French musette ha ha ha.” It had to change and we can thank the unique richness of modern Malian pop for this characteristically political intervention in the artistic process. But it meant that Cuban influences were gradually ousted from centre stage.

The political backlash was replicated throughout Africa, and Cuba’s involvement in the continent became more overtly warlike as a result.  The idealistic small-scale guerrilla activities of Che Guevara in the Congo mutated into wholesale military support for the MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, SWAPO in Namibia and the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia, as well as more covert logistical and advisory roles in many other countries. The CIA, the cynics, the supporters of US and South African policy, the Cuba haters, the believers in realpolitik put Cuba’s African policy firmly down to a desire to grab natural resources and drive strategic stakes into African soil, rather than any airy fairy notions of spreading international socialism and brotherhood. Maybe there’s some truth that. Geo-politics is never pretty after all.

Nevertheless, despite some glaring mistakes, like giving support to grim dictatorial neuropaths like Mengistu, the Cuban contribution to Africa has been positive in many ways.  Its involvement in Angola and Namibia was in large part responsible for the end of Apartheid in South Africa. Then there were all those doctors, those teachers, those nurses, those dentists, those agricultural specialists and those manufacturing advisors. Most Africans didn’t come face to face with Cuba on a battlefield but in a classroom, a surgery, on a farm, in a factory. And, inversely, countless African doctors, professors, administrators, project leaders, heads of industry, movers, shakers and musicians owe their training and their education to Cuba.  That’s probably one of the reasons why Fidel Castro was the first head of state that Nelson Mandela invited to South Africa after the end of Apartheid.  And that’s why so many Malian’s express nostalgia for their socialist past.

Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela

Toumani Diabate talks about this longing with a characteristic analytical incisiveness: “You know, Africa regrets the distancing of relations with Cuba. After the so-called ‘independence’ of Africa, the relationship between Africa and Cuba, China too, worked really well.  It resulted in the building of many schools, farms and factories in Africa, but especially in Mali.  We Africans realized then that we were very small and we saw what that relationship brought to Africa. It was a very open and honest relationship, based above all in graft and cultural exchange. The Cubans were never like the experts that the colonizers sent us, who earned big salaries and drove the latest cars. No, they lived like us, amongst us. The Cubans gave of themselves. But the colonizers didn’t like that co-operation between us so they stuck their oar in and ruined the relationship, with the connivance of our own Malian brothers. The truth must be told. Africa regrets all of that.”

So when the record producer Nick Gold traveled to Cuba in the early 1990s and fell in love with a cassette by the late great Ñico Saquito, the Afro Cuban story was already old, very old.  Gold, who was already infatuated with Malian music, had the genius to perceive and appreciate the well-spring of love for Cuba music that still flowed through Mali and West Africa and the strength of their intertwining histories. So he proposed the idea to the Cuban musician and producer Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, and to the guitarist and singer Eliades Ochoa, to bring some great Malian musicians including Djelimady Tounkara, Kasse Mady Diabate and Bassekou Kouyate, over to La Havana to record with some Cuban legends, thereby rekindling a very old flame. The first song they were planning to record was the Ñico Saquito classic ‘Al Vaiven de mi Carreta’, all about the sweat and tears of a Cuban peasant pushing his cart.

The Malians never arrived in La Havana, thanks to the mislaying of their passports by the Cuban embassy in Burkina Faso, or by the postal service, or some other dreary bureaucratic reason.  So Nick Gold, always ready to play tricks on adversity, called in Ry Cooder, Compay Segundo, Ruben Gonzalez, Ibrahim Ferrer, Cachaito Lopez junior and others, and used the already booked studio time to record the ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ album.  It has sold eight million copies to date.

Eliades Ochoa, however, never gave up on the idea of recording with the Africans.  He continued to pester Gold about it every time they met. “When are we going to record with the Africans?”  Gold was always busy. The Africans musicians had turned into bandleaders or famous instrumentalists in their own right, so they were always busy. The Cubans were surfing the immense wave of Buena Vista Social Club’s success, so they were always busy.  Twelve years went by.

Then in late 2008, this little window opened.  It seemed that Eliades Ochoa was going to be in Madrid with his band Grupo Patria.  And, incredibly, Toumani Diabate, Bassekou Kouyate, Djelimady Tounkara, Kasse Mady Diabate and the balaphon player Lassana Diabate were all going to be available at the same time.

So Madrid’s Sonoland studio was hired. The translator was booked. The Malians arrived in their bouboul robes. The Cubans were in their suits. Quick discussions took place. It was agreed that each musician was to be the ‘boss’ of the song they proposed, but that music would be the only overall boss.  It was also agreed that the Malians would improvise a little less for the communal good, and the Cubans would improvise a little more. Then they started playing, and the music just flowed.

Nick Gold’s World Circuit label released the ‘Afrocubsim’ album earlier this year.  “I think that the Mali-Cuban record came just at the right time,” says Toumani Diabate, “to reaffirm those old relationships, between Africa and Cuba, and China too, which are slowly coming back again.  We’re proud of that.  We’re happy with that.”

Hamada ben Amor aka 'El Général du Bled'

It was early morning on Friday 11th February and the streets of central Cairo were throbbing with adrenalin and fear. Long-haired American professor Mark Levine and Shung, founder of the Egyptian extreme metal band Beyond East, were caught in the pyroclastic flow of a million Egyptians who seethed towards Tahrir Square, past tanks, burned out buildings and soldiers with taut faces, through the rubble and detritus of two weeks of revolution.  Mubarak’s surprise announcement that he was holding on to his rotten throne had sent a collective groan of frustration through the nation.  The crowd feared that the time had come for desperate measures.  Marvelling at the mood of coiled rage all around, Mark and Shung looked at each other, wavelengths firmly locked, and said “This is really metal!”

Before the revolution, Egypt’s metal heads lived in fear of arrest. Bullet belts, Iron Maiden T-shirts, horn gestures and sweat ejaculating head banging were closet past-times for foolhardy freaks.  Bands like Bliss, Wyvern, Hate Suffocation, Scarab, Brutus and Massive Scar Era rocked their fans like the priests of a persecuted sect who lived in constant wariness of the ghastly Mukhabarat, Mubarak’s secret police.  Since 1997, when newspapers had ‘exposed’ the metal scene as a sordid sewer of Satanism and western decadence, metal was never a faith for the faint hearted.  “Here in Egypt, everything is Satanic if it’s unknown,” muses Slacker, drummer with Beyond East, and veteran of Egypt’s metal wars.

“The consequences of speaking out could be pretty dire,” explains Levine, author of the recently published ‘Heavy Metal Islam’, a startling look at metal heads, hip hop kids and other musical marginals throughout the Arab world.  “And for what?  What would it get you?”  Jail? Sodomy? The lash?  Any musician contemplating open revolt against one of the Arab world old-school authoritarian dictators, faced some stark choices. Zip up or die, in career terms at least. “We were like in a cocoon,” explains Skander Besbes, aka Skndr, a luminary of Tunisia’s electro and dance scene, “Closed in on ourselves, ignoring the regime and the authorities. You’re angry, but you move on, because you don’t know what to do.  I decided to compromise because I wanted to be involved in the music scene in Tunisia.”

Skndr organised parties and raves with his friends under the moniker Hextradecimal at a bar / restaurant called Boeuf sur le Toit in the town of Soukra.  It was a mecca for Tunisia’s rave scene, regularly hosting dub step, electro and rave nights. There Tunisian party people rubbed shoulders with musicians, artists and hacktivists like the newly anointed King of the Tunisian protest bloggers, Slim Amamou, aka Slim404, who has been made minister of Youth and Culture in the new post-revolutionary government. Mutual rants about the regime were fire walled from government eavesdroppers by the venue’s pumping sound system. “They were rare occasions when people could meet without feeling oppressed by the police or without the usual social barriers,” Skndr says.

However, electro music was a relatively safe option because it was instrumental. Metal and rock were partially protected by English lyrics which the local fuzz didn’t understand.  But if you sung in Arabic, you either cloistered yourself away in anodyne ‘high art’ music, or embraced the banal glitz of the local pop production line, prostituting yourself to conglomerates like Rotana, the huge Gulf-owned media and entertainment conglomerate that more or less controls the music industry in the Middle East.  Alternatively, you could choose to cup your hands around a flickering flame of integrity and fight a lonely battle out in the cold. Some popular Tunisian singers like Baadia had the guts to speak out. She denounced the brutal suppression of Tunisia’s first anti-corruption protests in the town of Redeyef back in 2008, before eventually fleeing Tunisia for the UK, where she was spotted singing alone in front of the Tunisian consulate during the recent revolution.  Others like Emel Mathlouthi and Bendir Man also deserve honourable mentions.

But it took a rapper to light a firecracker and lob it at Tunisia’s youth, whose frustration had been distilled into liquid hydrogen by years of government corruption, nepotism, ineptitude and general state imposed joylessness. Until a few months ago, Hamada Ben Amor, aka El Général du Bled was just a 21-year-old wannabe MC in a Stussy hoodie, leather jacket and baseball cap. He lived with parents and elder brother in a modest flat a drab workaday seaside town south of Tunis called Sfax where his mother runs a bookshop and his father works in the local hospital. El Général didn’t even register on the radar of Tunisian rap’s premier league which was dominated by rappers like Balti, Lak3y, Armada Bizera or Psyco-M.  It was a community riven by the usual jealous spats and dwarfed by the more prolific rap scenes of Morocco and France.

El Général had been quietly honing his very own brand of politically combustible rhyming since 2008 with tracks like ‘Malesh’ (‘Why?’) or ‘Sidi Rais’ (‘Mr President’).  Maybe it was the influence of the books his mother brought home from the shop.  Maybe it was his beloved Tupac Shakur. Whatever the reason, El Général was game for confronting le pouvoir, aka the corrupt regime of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.  “Before the revolution it was forbidden to do gigs,” he tells me over the phone from Sfax. “We just played our music over the internet, on Facebook, because there was no other way.  The media never talked to me and I didn’t have a label.”

Ramy Essam

On November 7^th, El Général uploaded a piece of raw fury called ‘Rais Le Bled’ (President, Your Country) onto Facebook.  “My President, your country is dead / People eat garbage / Look at what is happening / Misery Everywhere / Nowhere to sleep / I’m speaking for the people who suffer / Ground under feet.”  Within hours the song had lit up the bleak and fearful horizon like an incendiary bomb.  Before being banned, It was picked up by a local TV station, Tunivision, and Al Jazeera.  El Général’s Myspace was closed down, his mobile cut off.  But it was too late.  The shockwaves were felt across the country, and then throughout the Arab world.  That was the power of protesting in Arabic, albeit a locally spiced dialect of Arabic.  El Général’s bold invective broke frontiers and went viral from Casablanca to Cairo and beyond.

A few weeks later, El Général recorded another stick of political dynamite called ‘Tounes Bladna’ (‘Tunisia Our Country’), just as the revolution was gathering momentum.  The authorities had had enough.  On January 6^th, at 5am, thirty local cops and state security goons turned up at El General’s family flat in Sfax to arrest him, “on the orders of President Ben Ali himself.”  When his brother asked why, they answered “he knows.”  He was taken to the dreaded Ministry of Interior building in Tunis where he was handcuffed to a chair and interrogated for three days. “They kept asking me which political party I worked for,” he remembers. “”Don’t you know it’s forbidden to sing songs like that,” they said. But I just answered “Why? I’m only telling the truth.”  I was in there for three days, but it felt like three years.”  Eventually, thanks to a storm of public protest, El Général was released and returned to Sfax in triumph. Even the cops were now treating him as a celebrity. “People were proud of me,” he says cheerfully. “I took a risk, with life, with my family.  But I was never scared, because I was talking about reality.”

El Général’s rap broke the spell of fear and showed his peers that it was possible to rebel and survive. Rap’s power is its simplicity. “People can just record songs in their living room,” says Narcycist, an Iraqi born rapper living in Toronto, Canada, who got together with other MCs from the Arabic rap diaspora, like Omar Offendum, and released a tribute track called ‘#Jan25’ which has become a huge viral hit. “It’s something that can be easily done in the middle of a revolution.”

The Cairo massive: Arabian Knightz

Karim Adel, aka ‘Rush’ from Cairo rappers Arabian Knightz stayed up late into the night of Thursday January 27^th recording a new rhyme for the tune ‘Rebel’, which he was determined to release on Facebook and Mediafire.  “Egypt is rising up against the birds of darkness,” spat the rhyme. “It was a direct call for revolution,” Karim says. “Before we’d only used metaphors to talk about corrupt system. But once people were out on the streets, we were just like “Screw it, you know.”  If we’re going down, we’re going down.” He and his crew just about managed to upload the new version of the song before Karim was called away to help with the vigilante security detail who were down in the streets keeping his neighbourhood free from looters and government thugs.

After the uprising of January 25^th, Cairo’s Tahrir Square resounded to the traditional Egyptian frame drum or daff, which pounded out trancelike beats over which the crowd laid slogans full of poetic power and joyful hilarity. As the Egyptian people rediscovered what it felt like to be a Nation, united and indivisible, they reverted to the raw power of their most basic musical instincts to celebrate their mass release from fear – traditional drumming and chanting and patriotic songs from the glory days of yore when Egypt trounced the forces of Imperialism in ’56 or the Israelis in ’73.

During the revolutions of 1919 and 1952, or the mass student protests of 1968, poets used to monopolise the power that rappers now share.  The chain-smoking, cussing, national poet hero Ahmed Fouad Negm, ‘Uncle Ahmed’, was reinstated by the Tahrir protestors as Egypt’s bard of protest par excellence. A man of unbelievable courage, Negm has spent 18 of his 81 years in Egyptian prisons. The word ‘Fearless’ doesn’t begin to do him justice.  In 2006 he was being interviewed by the New York Times when a donkey brayed loudly outside Negm’s ramshackle flat in one of Cairo’s poorer neighbourhoods.  “Ah, Mubarak speaks,” he quipped to the astonished journalist.

‘The Donkey and the Foal’, Negm’s poisoned paean to Mubarak and his son Gamal, was set to music by Ramy Essam, a young engineering student who became the Billy Bragg of Tahrir Square. He sang the song to ecstatic crowds with the ancient Negm beside him, still standing tall.  Essam went to Tahrir early in the uprising with his guitar and cobbled together a song called ‘Leave’ from all the inventive slogans that were flying around the intoxicated air of the square.  It became the hit of the uprising, going viral on YouTube and Huffington Post before being picked up by CNN and then TV Networks around the globe.  Essam lived in Tahrir’s tent village for the entire revolution, composing songs, and playing almost every hour on one of the many stages that had sprouted across the square.

Ahmed Fouad Negm

In that microcosmic temporary utopia, Egypt rediscovered its love of freedom, honesty, joy and simplicity. The Revolution flensed away layers of glamorous sheeny blubber from the fatuous irrelevant body of Egyptian pop to expose a new punk-like directness and integrity in artists like Ramy Essam, Mohammed Mounir or Amir Eid Hawary from the rock band Cairokee, who gathered together other luminaries from the Cairo rock scene to record the rousing hymn-like anthem to the revolution ‘Sout El Houreya’ (‘The Voice of Freedom). The people were tired of bullshit, whether it was political, social, religious or cultural. When the slippery pop star Tamer Hosni was sent into the Square to try and persuade the protestors to go home, he was almost lynched, later issuing a blubbing apology on National TV.  Million selling pop idol Amr Diab fled the country with his family in a private jet bound for the UK at the start of the uprising.  He’ll find hard to look his country in the face again.

Zakaria Ibrahim, founder of the traditional street music ensemble El Tanbura, from Port Said, remembers the student protests of the late sixties and early seventies.  “I was very happy to see a second revolution in my life,” he tells me in his gentle wistful voice. Despite the head wounds received by his son Hassan when government good squads invaded Tahrir Square on horses and camels half way through the revolution, Zakaria went down to Tahrir with El Tanbura, and several other bands affiliated to the folk centre that Zakaria has founded in Cairo, to play regularly.  “People were completely excited to hear something new that they were never used to hearing before on state media,” he says proudly.  “Under Mubarak, Egyptians had become selfish and aggressive,” he continues. “But In Tahrir, you suddenly saw the other side of people, the kindness, the forgiveness and many things like that.”

All in all, as Noor Ayman, son of a famous dissident Egyptian politician, and founder of the legendary Egyptian metal band Bliss told me, “this was a very artistic revolution.”  Political freedom and cultural freedom danced hand in hand.  To be young, to be alive was bliss, but to rediscover the thrill of banging your head to the sound of a raw pummelling guitar, or spitting a rhyme to the mic, or strumming out the truth in simple chords, without fear or compromise…that was very heaven!

This article is dedicated to the memory of artist and musician Ahmed Bassiouni, who died in Cairo on January 28^th 2011, from injuries sustained fighting the police and government militias.

A collection of clips relevant to the article can be found here

POSTSCRIPT: On March 10th Ramy Essam took part in a demonstration in Tahrir Square.  He was arrested and severely beaten, even tortured, by the security forces.  The fight for freedom of expression in Egypt is far from over.

Ramy Essam tortured