Gao – Andy Morgan Writes

SIDI TOURE – Easy to listen to and easy to love…

Andy Morgan — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 23:03:05 +0000

Sidi Toure (Courtesy of Thrill Jockey)

When he was a child, Sidi Toure was told to go and hunt for bats in the Tomb of the Askia. On a good day, he and his harum scarum comrades could bring back ten or more, which made a tidy feast for the family. The monument wasn’t far from his home in the Sané district of Gao, an old trans-Saharan entrepôt on the Niger River that is now the capital of northern eastern Mali. A black and white postcard from colonial days depicts the tomb in a state of geometrically chiselled splendour, pyramidal in shape but stepped like an irregular ziggurat. Today, erosion by the annual rains and desert winds has turned it into the bearded sister of the Great Pyramid of Giza, sensuously curved and bristling with acacia branches that protrude from its adobe walls. “I spent my childhood round about the tomb,” Toure tells me. “It was my ‘school’ and I know it like the palm of my hands.”

It’s hard to fathom what this most striking relic of the Songhoy Empire means to Sidi Toure and millions of other Songhoy like him. The empire was founded more than five hundred years ago by Sunni Ali ‘Ber’ (‘The Great’) and brought to a dazzling climax in the middle of the 16^th century by one of his generals, Mohammed Askia Toure, before succumbing to the invading armies of the Sultan of Morocco. It was ruled according to the precepts of Islam, with a meritocratic government administration and educational establishments that attracted scholars from every corner of the Muslim world. The collective myths and memory of the Songhoy people, their deepest pride, find their focus in the Tomb of the Askia. Like the manuscripts of Timbuktu, its very existence trumps those who like to think that pre-colonial African history was devoid of civilisation.

In the summer of 2012, a group of young Songhoy men formed a vigilante guard to protect the tomb from the hard line Islamist mujahedeen of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, most commonly known by its French acronym MUJAO, who had taken control of Gao and imposed an joyless diet of fear and shari’a law on its populace. Les barbus – the bearded ones – were pulverising the tombs of Sufi saints in Timbuktu, 400 kilometres up river, and the citizens of Gao had good reason to fear for their beloved monument.

The Jihadi assault on local culture didn’t limit itself to tombs of course. In August 2012, a heavily bearded spokesman for MUJAO announced on a radio station in Gao that all music except for Quranic chanting was banned throughout northern Mali with immediate effect.

When I ask Sidi Toure for his reaction to the ban, he shakes his head and dishes up a tired little smile. “Even at the time of the Prophet there were griots who sang praises,” he says. “So I don’t see how people can come with other ideas to ban music. And what’s more, Gao is a place of Islam. The manuscripts of Timbuktu attest to that. Our grandfather Askia – it was because he loved Islam that he brought architects from Egypt. When you see the tomb of the Askia it has a pyramidal shape. That means that the architect came from Egypt to build things like that. We adore the same God but it’s moderate Islam that we love.”

The shape of the Tomb of the Askia isn’t the only thing that ancient Egypt gave to the Songhoy people. Almost uniquely amongst the major ethnic groups of the Sahel, the Songhoy still possess a rich pantheon of pre-Islamic deities or spirits which they call the Torou. The founders of this supernatural dynasty are commonly believed to have come from Egypt. One of their offspring was the water goddess and ‘original’ Songhoy mother, Harakoy Dicko, whom Sidi Toure refers to as “the siren”. Her first-born son is Marou Kirey: Marou ‘The Red’, and the youngest of her seven children is Dongo, the god of lightning. To commune with these spirits, humans must be eased into a state of trance by means of rhythm, song and dance. An entire corpus of music exists for that very purpose and the Songhoy call holey.

“To find Kirey, you have to find Dongo,” Sidi Toure explains. “Or to find Dongo, you have to find Kirey. When one comes along, infallibly, the other will also come. In Gao, when the countryside has a problem due to lack of rain, people have recourse to the holey. They take their violins, their calabashes and they go six or seven kilometres from Gao. There they beat their drums and before they get back to Gao, the rain will come.”

In 1984, Sidi Toure, who was then in his mid twenties, won a prize at the prestigious Biennale, Mali’s premier national music, theatre and dance competition, with an original composition called ‘Marou Kirey’. Like most of his music, the song was a blend of modern instruments and orchestration, holey and takamba, the loping rhythm of seduction that is Gao’s other contribution to Mali’s musical treasury.

Toure was already a star on his home turf and lead singer with Gao’s regional orchestra, the Songhoy Stars. Alongside his musical mentors Ali Farka Toure and Ibrahim Hamma Dicko, he was busy hauling Songhoy music and culture out of the northern sands and into the national spotlight. No easy task. In those days the Manding music of the south hogged the airwaves and printing presses. Music from the north – be it Songhoy, Touareg, Arab or Peul – had to struggle to earn playtime and respect.

Although, like most Songhoy, Sidi Toure rails against his Touareg neighbours for fighting rebellion after rebellion against the central government in Bamako and ripping the delicate silk of social relations to shreds in the process, he feels some sympathy with their fight for cultural recognition. In fact, take away the issue of independence for the north, and it’s surprising how much Songhoy and Touareg can agree about, despite their skewed image as traditional enemies.

“One cannot say that all that those Touareg are saying is false,” Toure tells me. “There are realities out there. You can colonise every aspect of me, but culturally you cannot colonise me. I refuse. I have a culture. Air time on TV – that must be open to everybody. Because TV is national. There’s no question of it only being for the Bambara or whatever.”

If his struggle is to put Songhoy culture on the national and international map, then Sidi Toure is winning. Not only is he well known throughout Mali, but his lilting Niger ‘hymns’ have colonised ears from Shanghai to Sacramento, and points in between, both ways.

If it were possible to render the term ‘easy listening’ into one that connoted only positive praise, then it would serve well to describe his music. Toure’s signature simplicity and elegance are in full gentle force on his new album Alafia (Thrill Jockey); the acoustic guitars, flutes, ngoni lute and voices meshing with a lilt and lack of excess to achieve a sensation akin to drifting down some wide and sun-blessed river while your hands trail in the coolness of its waters. Sidi Toure’s music has that ‘roll’ which Andy Kershaw once lamented the lack of in most rock’n’roll; an effortless inner propulsion that, like river currents or the beating heart, seems to be the child of divine physics. Needless to say, it’s the perfect soundtrack for a summer’s day behind the wheel.

Many an awkward label has been cobbled to try and categorise the genre that Sidi Touré’s music belongs to: desert blues, Niger blues, Sahara blues. If a link to American blues does exist then it belongs to the late 17^th rather than the late 20^th century. “When I released my first album,” Toure says, “I met this American journalist who said ‘Hey, what you’re playing there sounds just like wow wow wow by John Lee Hooker!’ I said to him, ‘But that John Lee Hooker of yours, who on earth is he?’ ‘He’s just a bluesman’ he said. ’Nope, don’t know him,’ I answered. ‘I’m just playing folk music from Gao.’”

Despite the easy caress of that folk music from Gao, Sidi Toure isn’t one to sing sweet nothings into your ear. His oft-repeated mantra of “Politics for politicians, art for artists” doesn’t stop him conceding that music has to be more than a sunbathe on the beach. “The artist has always been a fighter,” he agrees. “When someone tells you to listen to my music, it’s not to make you say ‘Ah, Sidi sings well!’. It’s to make you understand what Sidi is singing about. I fight! Look at the pollution in the Niger River, look at global warming. I sing about those things. I like artists who protest and get involved. Because the artist is the one who speaks out from the highest point about what others are saying at the lowest, whatever the consequences.”

And if there was ever a time when circumstances turned musicians into fighters, whether they liked it or not, it was those ten joyless months when Islamist gunmen gripped northern Mali in their puritanical claws. Lucky then that Sidi Toure wasn’t in his native Gao at the time. He’s been living down south in Bamako since 1992, but Gao and the great river have never stopped flowing through his arteries and neural pathways. You can take the northerner out of the north but you can’t…

Songs on Alafia like ‘Boro Ganda’ (‘My Land’) or ‘Gandyey’ (‘The Spirits’) put you in a pirogue and float you off from one of the many Gao river beaches that Sidi Toure use to frequent as a youth, in the direction of Koïma Hondo, a massive pink dune a few clicks down river that is Ayers Rock to the Songhoy, a place where the spirit-folk congregate far from the eyes of the un-initiated and laugh at our little human absurdities.

It seems strange that Sidi Toure was scorned in his younger days by elders who considered playing music to be a wasteful frivolity, entirely beneath the dignity of anyone bearing the noble name of Toure. “As soon as people say ‘Toure’,” Sidi tells me, “they immediately have a vision of a man with his head in Qu’ranic books.” Strange. The vision the name provokes in me is of a man in billowing blue robes dispensing liquid gold from a Gibson, a Taylor or a Takamine. Apparently, for some of us at least, the Toure name has become synonymous with praising the Almighty and raising the spirits of humankind through music rather than scripture. How lucky we are.

Predictably perhaps, peace is the central theme of Alafia. The name itself means ‘peace’. A devout Touareg friend once told me that if anyone angers or frustrates you, you should recite a incantation, just silently to yourself, every time you think of that person. Translated, it goes something like ‘Peace to all, peace above all, peace’.

Maybe the Songhoy are busy muttering alafia and “peace be to all” under their breaths as they contemplate the ravaged social landscape of their beloved homeland. But then, no one must forget that the river goddess Harakoy Dicko had seven sons in all, each fathered by a man from a different tribe. The ferocious Marou Kirey’s father was a Songhoy but his brother Mahama Surgou was fathered by a Touareg. And where there’s brotherhood there’s always hope.

Andy Morgan. (c) 2013
First published in Songlines Magazine – Feb 2014

The post SIDI TOURE – Easy to listen to and easy to love… appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

MUSIC CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI (extract) – “We have come here to teach you the true faith”

Andy Morgan — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:06:17 +0000

[pp 129-133] Vandalism and destruction along the great fault line of the Sahel

“We have come here to teach you the true faith,” says a tall mujahid, or Islamist soldier, to a small gathering of local Timbuktu people. He wears a plain brown bouboul – a traditional ankle length robe – and a light sandy coloured cheche, the turban worn by men, which covers his entire head, leaving only his eyes visible to the world. An AK47 hangs over his left shoulder, and khaki pouches festoon his belt. His voice is calm, ‘reasonable’, and his hands accompany his words with elegant gestures.

A local Songhai man gives the camera capturing the scene a bemused, conciliatory smile. He looks neither doubtful nor convinced, just gently puzzled. “Ouaha,” someone says softly in Arabic, “ok.” The mujahid and his fellow fighters continue to smash up old wooden statues of African deities, pounding them into the dusty street of Timbuktu. They’re the kind of statues that might have sat in the corner of a local home, like old friends, or formed expectant ranks in the dark interior of some local tourist emporium, waiting to be bought and carried back to Europe as a memento; dusty, mute and alien to foreign eyes.

Then another mujahid brings out a piece of paper, on which a benediction has been written. With it, he holds a little wrap containing a talisman, the kind that thousands and thousands of Malians wear in small leather pouches around their necks as a humble plea to invisible powers for protection and baraka – blessings. The mujahid brandishes the paper as if it were proof of some great sin and unwraps the package in front of his audience, which comprises mostly children who can barely hide their puzzled glee at this unexpected diversion from the banality of their daily routine. The mujahid then lights the piece of paper and holds disdainfully between thumb and forefinger while it burns to ash.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(c) Andy Morgan / Freemuse Publications 2013

The post MUSIC CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI (extract) – “We have come here to teach you the true faith” appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

MUSIC, CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI (extract) – “We don’t want Satan’s music!”

Andy Morgan — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:11:01 +0000

[pp 23-26] Scenes of musical life under Shari’a law

On Wednesday 22nd August 2012, the following announcement was made by Osama Ould Abdel Kader, a spokesperson for MUJAO based in the city of Gao: “We, the mujahedeen of Gao, of Timbuktu and Kidal, henceforward forbid the broadcasting of any Western music on all radios in this Islamic territory. This ban takes effect from today, Wednesday. We do not want Satan’s music. In its place, there will be Quranic verses. Shari’a demands this. What God commands must be done.”

In Gao, a group of teenagers sat around a ghetto blaster listening to Bob Marley. A Landcruiser pick-up loaded with tooled-up Islamic police came by and seeing the reggae fans, stopped and accosted them. “This music is haram!” – forbidden by Islamic law – said one of the MUJAO men as he yanked the cassette out of the blaster and crushed it under his feet. “Listen to this instead,” he barked, handing the startled reggae fans a tape of Cheikh Abderrahmane Soudais, the highly revered Quranic chanter from Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

In Timbuktu, a young teenager received a call on his mobile phone while he was standing on a street corner in the town centre. As the tinny ringtone sent out a looping riff lifted from a song by local singer Seckou Maiga, it was overheard by a group of Ansar ud-Dine soldiers who were standing nearby. One of them, not much older than the teenager with the phone, broke off from the group and strode over. “Hey! Give me that here!” he ordered. The youth handed over his phone slowly, his face blank and grim. Giving his shoulders an impatient shrug to better seat his AK47, the Ansar ud- Dine fighter opened the back of the phone, picked out the SIM card, and ground it into the dust with his feet. He then gave the phone back in pieces. “None of that Godless music, understand?!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Gao and Timbuktu the dusty streets rang with the synthetic sound of babies laughing, a strangely joyless sound. Forbidden to use musical ringtones on their mobiles, the local population adopted this ironic alternative. The effect was often eerie.

These are just a few snapshots of musical life in what was the most literal and brutal Shari’a jurisdiction in the world.

The MUJAO declaration of August 22nd 2012, was disingenuous for several reasons. First, music had been effectively banned in the north for several months already. The declaration only gave that ban a rubber stamp. Secondly, when the declaration spoke of ‘Western’ music, Satan’s music, it did in fact mean most forms of music; modern, traditional, electrified, acoustic, foreign and local. Only Sheikh Abderrahmane Soudais and his ilk were deemed entirely halal.

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

(c) Andy Morgan / Freemuse Publications 2013

The post MUSIC, CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI (extract) – “We don’t want Satan’s music!” appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

SUPER ONZE DE GAO – The takamba champions of the Niger bend.

Andy Morgan — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:21:05 +0000

“At the first Festival of the Desert in 2000/2001 there were many musical revelations – Tinariwen’s trajectory has been well documented – but another very different group had a huge impact on me: Super Onze de Gao just played one rhythm, but what a rhythm! Devastating and unlike anything I’ve heard, the relentless beat from the two calabashes had the impact of the first time I heard the Burundi Beat, or the Musicians of Jajouka. Two distorted desert lutes circled around each other calling to mind Hendrix’s most trancey moments or Howlin’ Wolf’s band when their sound turns into a web of abstract groove. I love the way the Super 11 Album sounds, I love the rawness and distortion and the heavy calabash sound. This CD brings to the West for the first time the undiluted sound of the Takamba – Not for the faint hearted – it deserves to be heard by everyone who loves wild groove music with no limits.” – JUSTIN ADAMS.

Gao and takamba: the background

The Niger sparkles like a giant sapphire luxuriating on a bed of green velvet as it flows past the city of Gao. All around the far horizons are dry, earthy-brown and immense. Travelers coming down from the arid Sahara drink their first sight of the great river from higher ground just to the north of the city. Vivid, intense colour floods back into their monochrome world. The promise of all that endless rolling blue water revives their parched senses. Thanks and praises are intoned by cracked lips. The desert crossing is over and the ‘shore’ of black Africa, or the Sahel as the Arabs called it, has been reached.

Until a few years ago, you had to navigate the Niger on a rickety old car ferry if you wanted to reach Gao on the main road from the west. Nowadays, a gleaming new Chinese-built bridge spans the sedate waters. The local people – mainly Songhai (pronounced ‘son-rai’ or ‘son-goy’), but also Tamashek, Bozo and Fulani – hope that this incongruously flashy piece of infrastructure is a sign of things to come. For far too long, their once proud homeland has been reduced to a quiet backwater, starved of attention, deprived of investment and stuck out on the eastern perimeter of Mali, far from the seat of power and influence in the capital Bamako.

Gao’s illustrious past owes everything to its prime location at the junction of the Niger and the Tilemsi valley, a huge superhighway of sand and rock that runs from north to south across the southern desert. Before Timbuktu stole its crown in the 16^th century, the city was the biggest caravan ‘port’ in this part of the Sahara, a proud and preeminent trading hub where gold, salt, slaves, ostrich feathers, ivory, millet and all the produce of Africa set out on its journey north to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Coming in the opposite direction, traders and students brought Islam and the cultural wealth of the Maghreb, Egypt and beyond, turning Gao into a Mecca of culture as well as trade.

In the fifteenth century, the great Songhai ruler Sunni Ali founded an Empire that stretched from the Aïr desert in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. Ali’s successor Askia Mohammed built and endowed universities and koranic schools, unifying his vast Imperium under Islam and establishing a sophisticated bureaucracy and legal system. Before the Moroccans invaded in 1591 and brought Gao’s dominance to an end, the Songhai Empire was one the largest and most sophisticated political entities that Africa had ever known. Two and a half centuries later, the German explorer Heinrich Barth found all that glory reduced to nothing more than a sleepy town of 300 adobe dwellings, sweltering by the cool evergreen shores of the great river.

Despite its waxing waning economic fortunes, Gao has always been certain, and proud, of its musical wealth. Songhai culture has given us Ali Farka Touré, Afel Bocoum, Baba Salah, Khaira Arby and Ibrahim Hamma Dicko, as well as a rich catalogue of different rhythms, instruments and musical styles. Among the most popular is takamba.

Takamba is music made for celebration; weddings mainly, but also birth and circumcision parties, harvest thanksgivings, festivities to mark the end of Ramadan, The Prophet’s birthday or the feast of Tabeski – as Eid is known in Mali – and many other occasions of communal joy. They say that takamba has its origins in a neighbourhood of the same name situated on the edge of the small town of Témera, up-river north of Gao, on the road to Bourem. Its driving force is the unmistakable takamba rhythm which pulses on the boom and bip before lurching at the end of every phrase, catching the uninitiated in mid-step. Try and imagine the lope of a camel combined with the flow of a vast sedate river and you’ll be getting close. This beat is locked down by one or more players of the calabash, a species of over-sized died out pumpkin gourd that sounds like an entire drum kit in the hands of skilled player, with its deep booming bass thump and rattling ‘hi-hat’ click.

Atop this sedate beat come the ngoni players. The ngoni is a three or four stringed lute. The Songhai call it the kurbu, and the Touareg the teherdent. With generous historical license you could call it the great granddaddy of the blues guitar and you wouldn’t be too far wrong. The takamba musicians play the ngoni sitting down, with the instrument lying on the floor and one knee pressing down on its body, as if they’re taming a wayward animal. With their flowing bouboul robes and heads enveloped in a cheche or turban, the ngoni players cut a cool debonair figure as the notes flutter and fizzle out of their fingers in a bewildering bluesy stream. In the last three or four decades, the ngoni has usually been stuck through an amp and a pair of deliciously distorted speakers. Super Onze employ the vintage bullhorn variety. This gives the music a modern punch and grimy edge that could easily rival The Velvet Underground or The Jesus and Mary Chain. Sometimes the ngoni is substituted with an electric guitar thus sealing its contemporary transformation.

The final layer in the takamba sound is the praise singer, the lead vocalist who directs proceedings. Takamba is a generous music. Its role is to make people feel important and happy. The lead vocalist will praise the bride’s beauty, the bridegroom’s strength, the illustrious lineage of the bride’s mother, and the great deeds of the bridegroom’s father. He’ll tell stories about the guests or recite ancient tales of love and bravery, compliment dignitaries for their honour, their astuteness and their generosity, making sure that the power structures that underpin society are recognised and reaffirmed in joyful music. In that sense, takamba, like all praise-music, has a very political and social purpose, which it fulfills in an understated non-confrontational manner.

And then there are the dancers. Not for takamba the wild gyrations and flailing limbs of many other Malian dance styles. Takamba moves are all about dignity, restraint, undulating limbs, covert smiles and trysting eyes. The dancers generally form two orderly lines which face each other, one for the women and one for the men. Sometimes they stand, sometimes they’re seated. The more traditional mode is the seated one, which places further restrictions on unseemly bodily movement but intensifies the subtle beauty of the dance. Takamba dancing is a metaphor for flowing water. It’s the body’s hymn to the river, the source of all life. All passion, all excitement is subsumed in its gentle undulations. But those passions still lurk beneath, just like the currents of the great river. That’s why some swear that takamba is the most erotic dance form in the whole of west Africa, albeit eroticism of the subtlest kind.

Both the city of Gao and the takamba style itself sit neatly and squarely on the frontier between two cultural spheres: the ‘white’ Arab / Berber culture of North Africa, and the black African culture of the Sahel and beyond. Although the Berber Kel Tamashek, or Touareg, and the black Songhai peoples have long been adversaries and have even known periods of open conflict in the past three decades, it’s common for takamba groups to feature both Songhai and Touareg musicians. For that reason, takamba is a potent and valuable bridging style, which stretches hands out across a fundamental cultural divide, and invites them to shake and make peace. Some even say that “take the hand” is one of the meanings of the word ’takamba’.

Super Onze de Gao

Super Onze de Gao was founded in the early 1980s by Haziz Toure, Asaalya Samake and Agita Moussa Maiga, who became the group’s first president. All three were Songhai men from Gao. In the venerable tradition of so many west African music ensembles, Super Onze was created in order to entertain at community celebrations, preserve traditions, propagate culture and create a kind of ‘club’ or community organization which could support the needs and nurture the talents of its members. In other words, it was more than just a ‘band’ in the European sense of the word. The founding members are still alive, but now it’s the next generation that fills the active roles in the group. That’s another advantage of their typically African orchestral structure. It doesn’t depend on any one individual or person for its survival, and can thus better cope with the passing of time.

Initially Super Onze de Gao played in their own homes, three or more times a month and especially on Fridays, the day of prayer and rest in the Muslim week. From the beginning they concentrated strictly on the takamba style, and were soon a popular feature of local weddings and festivities. In 1985 they gave their first ‘official’ non-festive concert, at an election gathering in Gao. The ex-military dictator of Mali, Moussa Traore, was returned to the presidency with an absurd 99.94% of the vote that year.

In 1986, Super Onze de Gao were invited to perform for the Songhai community at the French Cultural Centre in Niamey, the capital of neighbouring Niger, which is about a day’s journey from Gao by road. Throughout the ensuing years, the group gradually consolidated their position as the number one takamba outfit in eastern Mali. They participated three times in Mali’s famous Biennales – a government sponsored national competition to find the best music ensemble, best theatre group and best dance troupe in the nation – representing Gao in regional and national finals.

The Biennales were instigated by Moussa Traore in 1970 to instil cultural pride and community cohesion in the various regions of Mali, especially among the youth. Traore also hoped to strengthen the patriotic glue that bound Mali’s huge variety of cultures and ethnic groups together. Like many African leaders at the time, he was trying to build a nation from elements that hadn’t historically had very much in common. Moussa Traore has been branded a brutal dictator by history, justifiably so, but his Biennale system is one of the reasons that Mali is one of Africa’s musical powerhouses today.

Sometime during the 1990s, Issa Toure took over from his father Haziz as the main singer of Super Onze de Gao. He is now their president. He comes from a family of Songhai farmers, rooted in the rich alluvial mud of the Niger valley. His son is also preparing to become a singer, and will hopefully take over the leading role in the group in due course.

Super Onze’s leading ngoni player is Yehia Mbala Samake, son of Asaalya Samake. Yehia comes from a caste of Songhai blacksmiths. The role of blacksmiths in Songhai and Touareg society is very complex and very important. They belong to an endogamous group, which means you can only be born a blacksmith, you cannot become one. Until recently they were responsible for making almost everything necessary for nomadic or sedentary existence: tents, swords, spears, camel saddles, leather bags and cushions, padlocks, cooking utensils and, most importantly, jewellery. They still make jewellery and many other artefacts. But the role of the blacksmith has never been confined to artisanal manual labour. They’re also storytellers and guardians of family histories and lineages. They’re often called upon to negotiate between two rival clans, and to arrange marriages. And it’s their duty to play music at feasts and festivities. As such, their role has many affinities with that of the Manding or Bamana griot.

Ahmed Ag Assalat, the second ngoni player, also comes from a family of blacksmiths, but in his case it’s a Touareg family. The other Touareg in the group are Aliou Saloum and Ousmane Yattara, who come from a family of wood sellers. The remaining two members of the group are dancer Fatoumata Sarre, daughter of a blacksmith and ‘Cola’ Toure, second calabash player and the son of a farmer.

In 2003, Super Onze de Gao were invited to the third edition of the now world famous Festival in the Desert, which takes place annually near the village of Essakane, by Lake Faguibine, 60 kilometres due west of Timbuktu. They were the unheralded hit of the Festival. Robert Plant became a fan overnight, as did his guitarist Justin Adams. Both harbour a life-long mission to seek out the distant African and North African ancestry of the American blues. When they heard Super Onze de Gao in the silky white dunes of Essakane, it was nothing short of a ‘Eureka’ moment. Ali Farka Toure asked Super Onze to warm up the crowd before his performance; a very wise choice.

Although Super Onze de Gao – who are also known by the alternative name Takamba Super Onze – became fêted regulars at the Festival in the Desert and were famous all over Mali, they failed to find a partner to help them launch an international career. They did make one off trips to Washington DC for the Smithsonian institute’s lavish festival of Malian culture in 2004 and the Sfinks Festival in Belgium in 2008. But it wasn’t until the arrival of the Dutch DJ and producer Horst Timmers, aka MPS Pilot that their dream of international recognition began to be realised.

Timmers saw Super Onze at the Festival in the Desert in 2003 and, along with so many others, was blown away. He returned to the Festival the following year, and found that the band’s impact even more powerful. In 2008 he travelled to meet Super Onze and put together a plan to launch their career outside Europe. He enrolled them into an ambitious project that melded takamba with electronica, or ‘la machine’, as the group members themselves refer to new computer-based music technology. The project is called Future Takamba and it toured around Holland and Belgium in October of that year.

Timmers also did a recording session with Super Onze de Gao ‘sans la machine’, in other words, pure and simple, live and direct, in August 2010 and the resulting CD, released by Two Speakers Records, is the best record of raw and rootsy takamba ever released. If Justin Adams is to be believed, you might just find it “devastating” and unlike anything you’ve ever heard.

Artist biography for Future Takamba Project

Super Onze de Gao / Future Takamba Links:

Two Speakers – Super Onze de Gao CD

Super Onze on Facebook

Super Onze on Bandcamp

Super Onze on Soundcloud

The post SUPER ONZE DE GAO – The takamba champions of the Niger bend. appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.