“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.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2011

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

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Despite Ahmed’s claims, it now seems certain that up to 800 young Touareg have been lured north from Mali and Niger to go and fight as mercenaries for Gaddafi since the start of the Libyan uprising. This is unsurprising perhaps if you consider the dire state of poverty and joblessness in the southern Sahara. Decades of drought, under-development and ethnic conflict have recently been exacerbated by the presence of Al-Qaeda In the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) whose kidnappings have put an end to tourism and foreign investment in the region. Gaddafi’s promise of arms and petrodollars represent a pill of hope, albeit a bitter tasting one. Some Touareg youth feel they have no option but to swallow it.

Gaddafi has been buying the affections and fighting skills of the nomadic tribes of the Sahara for a long time. His vision of a borderless desert, an Islamic republic of the Sahara, has often found favour with the Touareg, who have been fighting their own struggle for political self-determination and cultural recognition against the governments of Mali and Niger since independence back in 1960. Gaddafi invited young Touareg immigrants in Libya to join his Islamic Legion in the early 1980s before sending them off to fight wars in Chad, the Sudan and the Lebanon. The same Touareg soldiers then unleashed their own rebellions against Mali and Niger in the 1990s. Despite widespread suspicion that Gaddafi only ever helped the Touareg to further his own territorial schemes, many Touareg fear the consequences of his fall from power. After all, for the past half century, he is the only head of state in the world who has ever supported their cause with arms and cash.

“The Touareg who are fighting in Libya are the ones who live there anyway,” says Nina Walet Intallou, elected member for the Kidal region in Mali’s national advisory council and representative of the Touareg rebel movement. “The south of Libya is Touareg territory. They’re obliged to hold on to what is theirs because if Gaddafi goes, they fear what will happen to them. There’s a risk of total destabilisation in the region. Many people in Libya detest the Touareg. Before Gaddafi came to power they weren’t allowed to go to Benghazi, for example, without a special pass.  So if Gaddafi’s enemies are given power, we’re really asking what will become of us.  We may even face the complete disappearance of the Touareg as a people.”

Other Touareg leaders cite the severe political and social strain that could result from the fall of the Gaddafi regime and the consequent return of thousands of exiled Touareg from Libya to their homelands in Mali and Niger. Many of these returnees will probably be impoverished, disaffected and, what’s worse, heavily armed.  Such an influx would pose a severe challenge to the already tenuous peace that exists between the Touareg and the central government of Mali in Bamako. Ironically, Gaddafi has also been investing heavily in agriculture, water infrastructure, hotels and other sectors in southern Mali, where the Touareg are seen as the enemy. Amadou Toumani Touré, the current President of Mali, was the first of many African leaders to call Gaddafi and express his support after the rebellion broke out in Libya. 

Hama Ag Sid Ahmed, spokesperson for the Democratic Alliance for Change (ADC), the Touareg rebel movement set up in the wake of an uprising in Kidal in 2006, is well aware of the ambiguous attitudes to Gaddafi among the Touareg. The Libyan leader has often given financial support to Ag Sid Ahmed’s boss, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, the hard line Touareg rebel leader who has refused to make peace with the Malian government, blaming Mali’s intransigence and broken promises for his uncompromising stance.

“The Touareg are divided on the Libyan question,” says Sid Ag Ahmed. “Some say that Libya has sided with the Touareg during difficult moments in our history, and that Libya has been an invaluable rear base during the Touareg uprisings.  Others say that Libya has never brought us any concrete help or political progress.  And yet others say that Libya has actually prevented things evolving normally in the region.”

Gaddafi and his son Seif al-Islam Gaddafi have both played an active part in the endless peace negotiations between Touareg rebels and the governments of Mali and Niger.  In the case of Mali however, Libyan intervention has often lead to conflict with Algeria, who see the deserts just over their border with Mali as their own natural sphere of influence and resent Gaddafi’s meddling in the area.

On the international stage, Gaddafi has often proclaimed his great affinity to the Touareg as a people. He is said to have inherited some Touareg blood from his mother, and he sees the Touareg as natural allies in his overriding ambition to create a Sahara without borders, unified by Arab culture and Islam. However, Gaddafi’s international pronouncements are in stark contrast with the way in which he has treated the Touareg and their culture in his own country.  In a speech he gave in 1985, he famously claimed that mothers who taught their children Tamazight, the language of the Touareg, were injecting them with poison.

Akli Sheika, a Libyan Touareg living in exile in Britain, was imprisoned for teaching Tifinarh, the ancient Touareg alphabet, in Libyan schools.  “I consider Gaddafi to be the enemy number one of the Touareg people,” he told me. “Most of the Touareg in Libya want Gaddafi to leave. Gaddafi is recruiting the Touareg by force and threatening them with violence if they don’t fight with the protestors.  Many Touareg from Ghat and Ubari in the south have actually fled to Djanet in Algeria.”

When I speak to Abdallah, a Libyan Touareg who is virtually imprisoned in his family home in Tripoli by all the violence going on in the streets outside, his views are unequivocal.  “Countries like Mali and Niger who have been killing the Touareg for over forty years, now want to exploit the situation by saying that the Touareg are supporting the regime here,” he says in an anxious voice.  “But this is false. About 200 Touareg have been killed here because they refused to obey orders to shoot innocent protestors. And now the Touareg youth have joined the revolution against the regime…” Abdallah was only able to speak for a few more minutes before insisting he had to hang up because his mobile phone was being tapped.

The fall of Gaddafi is sure to bring fundamental changes to the political situation in the southern Sahara.  Whether, as many Touareg in Mali and Niger think, Gaddafi’s demise will spell disaster for the Touareg people, or, as many Libyan Touareg claim, it will spell freedom after four decades of oppression, remains to be seen.

(The names of some of the persons in this report have been changed to protect their identities).

Andy Morgan. (c) 2011

An edited version of this article was first published as a ‘Monocolumn’ by Monocle Magazine (online edition only) – March 2011

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“We hadn’t thought of creating a group when we travelled together to the famous Festival in the Desert near Timbuktu in 2004,” explains Etran Finatawa’s bandleader Ghalitan Khamidoune, a diminutive Touareg with a gentle purposeful manner.  “The two musical cultures are very different, different instruments, different vocal styles.  We’d only written a couple of songs together back in Niamey, which we wanted to perform as a kind of finale at the Festival to show the Malians what musicians from Niger can do.  It was only when we saw the joy of the audience response, and found that people were congratulating us all the way back home, that we felt there was maybe something there.”

This hunch received an overwhelming endorsement with the recent release of Etran Finatawa’s debut CD ‘Introducing’ on the World Music Network label.  Reviews have been liberally sprinkled with words like ‘unearthly’, ‘hypnotic’, ‘haunting’ and ‘compelling’, accolades which justify themselves within seconds of pressing the play button.

Powered by the perpetual motion of the Touareg tindé drum, the Etran Finatawa groove possesses a kind of inexhaustible inner dynamo, a sublime transport that carries a cargo of joyous call and response vocals, booming bass and effortlessly intricate electric guitar licks, all of which reinforce the wide linear horizons of the music and echo the endlessly horizontal skyline of the group’s desert home.   This raucously poised sound was captured with sensitivity and expertise by producer Chris Birkett at his Chateau Richard studios in the heart of the dreamy wine-growing country of St Emilion near Bordeaux in the summer of 2005.

Onstage Etran Finatawa come across like an enthralling Saharan fashion display.  The three Touareg members look stately in their top-to-toe indigo robes, whilst the tall slender-armed Woodabé disport the intricate and strangely effeminate make-up which has made Woodabé men-folk a byword for African masculine beauty.  Back home in the desert, at certain key traditional gatherings, young Woodabé men gather in their hundreds to go through this laborious beautification process, delicately daubing their faces with a combination of natural dyes and the highly toxic black powder of used batteries, before lining up to roll the whites of their eyes and flash their teeth in the hope of being chosen for a night of passion by one of their female ‘judges’.   It’s the most famous dating ritual in the world, a magnet for generations of anthropologists, travel photographers and film-makers, like Werner Herzog, who captured the process on film in his opus ‘The Herdsmen Of The Sun’.

Although Etran Finatawa are proud to give the world a ravishing glimpse of this ancient beauty, what they really embody is the painful clash between nomadism and the modern world. Like so many of his Woodabé kin, percussionist and vocalist Bagui Bouga was forced by drought and desertification to move from his ancestral pastures to the polluted streets of Niger’s capital Niamey in search of work.  “Times have changed,” he says ruefully. “Nomads suffer now.  There isn’t enough water or good pasture for the animals.   Grain is expensive.  A majority of people prefer to live in the towns, because at least you can find food there, and water from a tap, and soap to wash yourself.  But in the towns we suffer too.  We can only find menial jobs as watchmen and caretakers, for 10,000 CFA (about £10) a month.  We have to sell our cattle and camels to pay debts.”

In the early 1990s, the Touareg, who have always been more politically engaged than their Woodabé neighbours, launched a rebellion against the central governments of Niger and Mali in an attempt to wrest back a modicum of self-determination and find their own solutions to the seemingly insurmountable problems that were facing the people of the Southern Sahara.  It was an upheaval of cataclysmic proportions that produced few positive benefits, one of which was a flourishing modern desert music scene in which time-honoured traditional instruments were ditched in favour of the electric guitar, and old tales of heroism and natural beauty replaced by rebel songs.

“The first cassettes I heard featured Inteyeden and Kheddou, who were members of Tinariwen back then,” remembers Bagui.  “We really liked them and it gave us the idea of doing the same thing with our Woodabé songs and poetry.”  Meanwhile Ghalitan had also taken up the guitar, inspired by the music of a rebellion that was actually ignited by an army massacre in his hometown of Tchin Tabaraden.  When peace came in 1995, he moved to Niamey and started his first group Etran N’Guefan, “The Stars of the Dunes’.  Bagui was a member of Kaouritel, the first self-consciously performance-orientated Woodabé troupe ever to exist, before leaving to form his own ensemble ‘Finatawa’.  “It’s the collective word for all our traditions and customs,” explains Bagui.  “And all those aspects of our culture that belong to every child who is born Woodabé.”  After that fateful rendezvous at the Festival in the Desert in 2004, the two struggling musical entities fused to become Etran Finatawa, ‘The Stars of Tradition’.

For the jobless desert migrants of Niamey, music is an antidote to the terminal hopelessness of sitting around all day, shooting the breeze and knocking back cups of bittersweet gunpowder tea.  Encouraged by their budding international success, Etran Finatawa harbour ambitious plans to shake up the Nigerien music scene for the benefit of all.  “We hope in the future to create a recording studio, a record label and distribution system, not just for the Touareg, but for all musicians,” says Ghalitan.  “The music scene in Niger isn’t in very good shape.  There’s no infrastructure and the whole question of composer’s rights hasn’t been sorted out.  The government do very little to help because unlike the Malians, they haven’t understood the importance of music for developing the image of the country.  We want to show the world that Niger is not Nigeria, and that it has nomads who make great music!”

These plans have an aura of dire necessity about them.   It’s clear that all the members of Etran Finatawa miss their spacious homeland when they’re holed up on tour in European hotel rooms.  “Back home we love to take our time to eat, to chat and to drink tea.  Here there’s always a programme,” admits Bagui.  “When I’m in Europe it feels like I’m permanently shut up in side.  I can’t see the horizons and there’s so much noise.  Back home we’re free.”

But that freedom is under serious threat.  The droughts and subsequent famine of 2005 in Niger rang alarm bells throughout the world.  Those same alarm bells chime incessantly in the minds of Ghalitan and Bagui.  “”In my opinion, I can’t talk about the others, we’re in danger of loosing our nomadic culture,” Ghalitan declares.  “Education poses a huge dilemma for us.  We need to educate our children, but once we’re gone, what will they become…bureaucrats and administrators.  They won’t go back to the bush.  And the desert is growing every day.  Animals can’t eat sand.  Once sand gets into the stomach of a cow, that’s it.  She dies.   There’s nothing you can do.”

It seems that Etran Finatawa are on a mission of far greater urgency that just making us dance to their gorgeous unstoppable grooves.

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Some of the clichés of the European imagination can stand up to scrutiny. The Sahara is definitely hot, with a mean annual temperature of over 30°C. In the hottest months of April and May, just before the rainy season arrives, temperatures can leave the 50°C mark way behind. But the Sahara can also be cold, viciously cold. Hapless night travellers sometimes die of cold in the desert. The Sahara is certainly arid, with annual rainfall rarely more than 25mm and often less than 5mm in certain parts. An area like the Tanezrouft, the featureless plain that surrounds the ancient salt mines of Terhazza and Taodenni, is so dry that it is known as the ‘land of thirst’ or the ‘desert of the deserts’. In 1809 the bodies of 2000 caravaniers and their camels were found by chance in the Tanezrouft. Loosing your way and loosing your life can be fearfully synonymous in certain parts of the Sahara. But elsewhere, in the ‘wet’ months of July and August, floods occur, dry sandy beds become torrential rivers, lakes and ponds fill up, vistas become surprisingly green and wells overflow with water. At that time, local nomads feel a deep sense of relief and happiness as life is guaranteed for another year, and the impulse to celebrate and make music becomes especially potent.

The Sahara is vast. It spans the African continent from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, and from the Atlas ranges and the Mediterranean in the north to the Sahel in the south. The whole continent of Europe would fit into it easily, with plenty of space to spare. But in this huge expanse there is also a great variety of landscapes; seas of sand-dunes or ergs like The Grand Erg Occidental that faithfully provide a palpable answer to every child’s ultimate desert fantasy; billiard table-flat plains of gravel or regs that stretch for hundreds of miles like the Tanezrouft and Tamesna, so feared by generations of travellers; mountains ranges like the Hoggar, the Tibetsi, and the Aïr, with their mesas and lunar contours; desiccated scrublands in the Sahelian ‘coast’ of the southern desert; vast oases in the shadows of the Atlas ranges in the north. Each of these landscapes are capable of both extremely fierce, and extremely tender expressions, depending on the light, the heat and the time of day.

Although the Sahara is sparsely inhabited, with a population roughly one third that of greater London living in a territory far larger than Europe, it is by no means empty. The pre-historic stone carvings and paintings that literally litter some parts of the desert bear silent witness to a time when the Sahara was much wetter than it is today, carpeted by tall Savannah grasses and populated by rhinos, elephants, hippos, giraffes and chariot-riding humans. Since the land dried up, around 3000 BC, the Sahara has become a bolthole for peoples and tribes escaping invasion, war and oppression in North Africa, Egypt, The Middle East and black Africa. All the peoples who now live there…Touareg, Fulani, Moor, Tubu…have origination myths that tell of ancestors who came from some other place, conquered the ‘primitive’ people they found living there, and set up home. The Sahara has been decisively Islamicised since at least the 10th century AD, but faint hints of earlier Pagan, Jewish and Christian migrations can be found in the language and customs of its modern inhabitants.

Most Saharan people are still nomads, although the sedentary way of life is gaining ground. Outsiders often confuse the concept of nomadism with a kind of primeval soul-searching. In fact it is a life born of necessity. A nomad will roam a fixed territory, moving his herd of camels, cattle or goats with the seasons and the rains from well to well, pasture to pasture. It is an extremely harsh existence but it brings with it a priceless independence and a deep bond between man and nature. A nomad needs little or nothing except what the land and sky around him freely provides. Most recent conflicts, like those between the French colonisers and various Touareg factions like the Kel Ahaggar, Kel Aïr and Ouellemeden, arose when the Touareg felt that their freedom and independence were threatened. The Touareg rebellion that broke out in the Adrar des Iforas region against the newly minted Malian state in 1963, and more recent rebellions in the early 1990s, also share the same root causes. Why must we pay taxes when God provides all we need? Why must we educate our children to read and write when neither of these skills will help them survive in the bush? Why do we need papers or passports to cross lands that our forefathers have roamed freely for centuries?

This sense of freedom is also the secret of the Sahara’s seductiveness. The desert and the nomads who inhabit it, embody so much of what was irrevocably lost in Europe and other ‘developed’ societies long long ago; space, simplicity, freedom, timelessness and the bond with nature. The epic immensity and undisturbed silence of its landscapes are the perfect antidote to bricked-up lives and the tyranny of the clock. Most newcomers sense the awesome pull of this freedom almost immediately. For the local, it is perhaps more subliminal, co-existing with hard and unremitting physical labour, corrupt officialdom, droughts, flash floods, atrocious roads and the occasional rebellion. Life in the desert is not easy, but it is both seductive and essential.

In terms of music and culture, the Sahara is like an inland sea, where the sounds, tastes and colours of peripheral ‘port’ cities like Marrakesh, Sijilmassa, Timbuktu, Agadez, Ghardaia, In Salah, Ghat, Ghadames, Tunis, Tripoli, Siwa, Cairo, Walata, Chinguetti, Djenné and Kano have mingled for centuries. This fact makes it a fascinating catalytic space whose role mirrors that of the Mediterranean Sea to the north. Over its immense rock-strewn wastes, the Arab and Berber cultures of the Maghreb have cross-faded with those of the Fulani, Songhai, Manding, Bambara, Wolof, Dinka and many more further south.

Our odyssey through the immense musical treasury of the Sahara starts in the far north west of the territory, in the huge oases of the Tafilalet, which nestles under the towering bony vertebrae of the Saharan Atlas range. It’s an area that gave birth to numerous quasi-religious dynasties that went on to conquer swathes of the Maghreb and southern Spain. The present Moroccan King, Mohammed VI, is a descendant of one such clan. It’s clear that the region is a source of immense musical riches too. The Compagnie Jellouli & Gdih come from Erfoud, the capital of the Tafilalet, and they play a style of music known as al baldi, in which the elegance of Andalusian melodies are coupled with the searing intensity of Berber music from the Atlas, and the harrowing lyricism of popular malhoun poetry. Centuries ago, the caravaniers that left the region to travel south to the salt mines of the Tanezrouft before crossing the Sahara to trade in their salt for an equal weight of gold in the bilad as soudani, ‘The Land of the Blacks’, must have had melodies such as this one swirling in their heads.

Moving over one thousand miles west by south-west we come to the Republic of Mauretania and one of its most remarkable up and coming young stars, Malouma Mint Meidah. Malouma has forged a name for herself as an innovative band leader and outspoken female voice in a country which has long been straight jacketed by fundamental Islamic mores and the dominance of old traditional musical castes. ‘Jraad’ is taken from her second album ‘Dunya’, which was recorded in the capital Nouakchott and released to global acclaim in 2003. It faithfully portrays her rebellious musical spirit, and her desire to incorporate jazz, blues, rock, soul together with the widest possible range of native Mauritanian sounds into a stunningly original new mix, thereby giving her fellow Mauritanians a bright new musical horizon.

The northeastern corner of Mali, a region known as the Adrar des Iforas, has been a cradle of dissent since independence in the early 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s drought and oppression drove thousands of young Touareg, or ‘Kel Tamashek’ (The Tamashek speaking people) as they refer to themselves, into exile in Algeria and Libya. In military training camps set up by the opportunistic Colonel Khadafy, these young clandestinos learned how to fight, and in the early 1990s they returned home to launch a rebellion. Tinariwen were the pied pipers of this youthful movement of so-called ishumaren, or ‘unemployed’. Since the first Festival in the Desert, which took place near their hometown of Kidal in the Adrar in 2001, Tinariwen have toured the globe and the outside world has woken up to their searing skeletal brand of desert blues. However, ‘Alkhar Dessouf’, a mesmerically moody song about loss, nostalgia and love, illustrates the essential point about Tinariwen. They are first and foremost rebels of the soul, not the Kalashnikov, and their real battleground is the human heart.

The songs, rhythms and melodies of black African slaves and migrants and their descendants are a core element of modern North African music. In Morocco this heritage is sometimes called gnawa music, in Algeria it’s called diwan, or more specifically diwan de Bechar. Bechar is a dust blown town on the northern edge of the Sahara, made famous in colonial times by the antics of the Foreign Legionary garrison stationed there. It is now home to Hasna El Becharia, doyenne of the diwan style, and queen of the vibrant local wedding music scene. Hasna is virtuoso of the various Afro-Maghrebi instruments like the gut-string bass known as the guembri, or the metal castanets known as krakesh, and her jaunty tune ‘Hakmet Lakdar’ sums up her Afro-Berber-Arabic heritage very well.

Taking one of those huge geographical leaps that are obligatory in any brief overview of Saharan music, we end up in the southern Libyan oasis of Fezzan, whose links with the Mediterranean world date back to pre-Roman times. The territory has long been a battleground with Touareg and Arab nomads who have fought with the local black African Tubus for control. Chet Fewet are a powerful and youthful musical combo from the area, whose Arab-flavoured melodies are lent a rough, rootsy fire by the group’s own Touareg berber heritage.

It’s not only misinformed Europeans that have deemed the Sahara an empty place. Rapacious North African leaders have also used this widespread misconception to further their territorial ambitions. In 1975 King Hassan II of Morocco lead an army of soldiers and civilians into the vast deserts that line the Atlantic coast south of Morocco, which had previously been called ‘Rio d’Oro’ or ‘Spanish Sahara’. As far as he and his counsellors were concerned, this ‘empty’ territory was Morocco’s by historical and geographical right. The local Sahraoui people disagreed and their military arm, the Polisario, have been fighting for independence ever since. This bitter struggle has few silver linings, but one has been superlative canon of Sahraoui songs and recordings inspired by the conflict. Aziza Brahim, Nayim Alal and Mariem Hassan are all leading lights in this movement, and the raw uncompromising power of their music is self-evident.

Another group born out of struggle is Tartit Ensemble, let by the charismatic Fadimata ‘Disco’ Walet Oumar. Tartit, which means ‘union’, are all Touareg from the Kel Antessar tribe who have held sway in the deserts around the historic city of Timbuktu for centuries. During the Touareg rebellion of the early 1990s, Disco and many of her fellow Kel Antessar escaped to refugee camps in Mauretania. It was there that they founded a women’s music group in order to foster good spirits and strengthen cultural pride. With the help of friends and aid agencies they managed to tour Europe and have since become the world’s most famous ambassadors of traditional Touareg music. The group mostly comprises women, but it also includes a few men, including the singer Mohamed ag Abada, who performs with such haunting effect on the song ‘Ikruhuwaten’, which was recorded in the refugee camp in 1996. Tinariwen, Tartit and the Sahraoui musicians are all proof of the painful irony that while conflict and rebellion have had a cruel and devastating effect on desert peoples and their lives, they have also been the source of some of the greatest modern music to come out of the region.

The Songhai people have shared the southern fringes of the Sahara, along the banks of the Niger River, with the Touareg for centuries, and despite recent events, the two ethnicities have managed to live in harmony for most of that time. The city of Timbuktu and its environs have thrown up Songhai musicians of international repute like Ali Farka Touré and Afel Bocoum, but these names are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. A local musical hero is the young Songhai singer Seckou Maiga, who has established himself as a serious contender after only three cassette releases. The cover of his 2002 release ‘Malfa Sibori’ depicts the Flame of Peace of 1996, a milestone event in which 3000 small arms, collected from combatants on both sides of the Touareg rebellion, were burned on a ritual pyre on the outskirts of Timbuktu. The Flame of Peace marked a definite end to hostilities and the beginning of a fragile peace which has so far managed to hold fast.

Another group who have helped to make the Timbuktu region a trove of musical, as well as historical treasures, are Kel Tin Lokiene. Lead by Hemi Ag Akreirou, this fifteen strong troupe delve deep into the funky yet diamond hard heart of traditional Touareg music. Their subject matter is often dominated by tales of old heroes and warriors, and the virtues of courage and chivalry that were apparently so much stronger in days of yore than now. Nostalgia for the past is an affliction felt as strongly in the Sahara as in Europe or anywhere else.

Agadez in northern Niger is a town that rivals Timbuktu in terms of historical and political importance. The presence of local uranium mines, made world famous by the hollow claims of President Bush and his entourage in the lead up to the second Gulf war, have also afforded the area increased wealth and notoriety. The nearby deserts of the Aïr and the immense Grand Erg du Ténéré possess some of the most beautiful and breath-taking scenery in the entire Sahara. Group Oyiwane are a local group lead by Balla ‘Barmo’ Kader, that have existed for two decades. Their music is based on the traditional rhythm of the tindé drum, which is itself based on the loping gait of the camel.

The Berber music of the northern desert fringes in Algeria is sometimes called Sahraoui, not to be confused with the people and music of the Western Sahara. Its core instrument is the rosewood desert flute or gasba, whose searing plaintive tones best describe the sound and mood of a forlorn desert wind blowing in from those interminable stony prairies. Sahraoui Bachir is one of the leading cheikhs, or improvising male poets and singers, of the genre. His vocal style is stark and powerful. It’s a sound that sums up the Sahara, in all its fearful, harsh yet seductive beauty.

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Ousmane from Tamikrest

I’ve been busy translating the lyrics for the forthcoming album by Tamikrest, the band from north eastern Mali lead by the talented Ousmane Ag Moussa. If you don’t know them already check out their existing album ‘Adagh’. One thing I always suspected but now know for sure is that Ousmane is a really excellent poet. As usual when I’m trying to get to grips with Tamashek poetry in translation, reading Ousmane’s lyrics in French gives me the feeling that I’m drinking a super fine whiskey that’s been watered down to a faint and washed out compromise, in comparison with the original. It reminds me of something that I learned quickly when I went to the Sahara and started working with Touareg musicians: their lyrics, or poems, are at least as important as their music, and probably a lot more so.

Some people complain about the repetitive nature of Touareg music: the drone, the simple call and response arrangements, the track-bound linear form of every song. It’s only a problem if you don’t understand the lyrics. I’m certain of that. And of course, apart from the very few non-Saharans who have learned how to speak Tamashek fluently, and there are some of those blessed people out there, most of us don’t understand the lyrics. Which is a crying shame. It’s left to record companies to squeeze a French translation out of the artist, and then someone like me, to turn that French into English. I’ve tried my best, and hopefully, the core meaning of each song will be very clear. But all those verbal subtleties, the puns, the nuances, the colour of and the depth of meaning of the original, will hover like an enticing aura around the words, unreachable to most of us. I’d love to do some more in depth translating work, like a real project, where the poet and the translators (English, French etc), sit down over days, weeks even, and discuss meaning and word play and all those issues. A Scottish poet called Don Paterson, who I really admire, recently published a book of poems by Rilke. His essay on the great German poet seemed to imply that trying to achieve literal translations of poetry is a useless exercise. You can only ‘version’ the original into something approximate in a new language, like a DJ doing a remix of a song, or a Jamaican dub master creating a version excursion. I like that idea. It injects real creativity into the job of translating.

Anyway, let’s hope the opportunity presents itself soon. In the meantime, look out for the Tamikrest album, which will be out sometime later in the year on Glitterhouse Records. And don’t blame me for the translations…I did my best, honest!

Andy Morgan (c) 2011

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If your power is almighty,

Then help the Touareg man.

Since his beginning,

He has lived in arid zones,

Rigorous, deserted

And without means.

He looks at the ever-changing world,

That overtakes him,

And he is left behind

In his ignorance.”

‘OUTAMACHEK’ from the album ‘Adagh’ by Tamikrest (Written and composed by Ousmane Ag Mossa – Translation by Andy Morgan).

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s Tinariwen who created the path,” declares Ousmane Ag Mossa, frizzy-locked leader of Tamikrest, in a pre-emptive strike against a thousand inevitable questions. “But the way I see it, if younger bands don’t come through, then Touareg music will eventually die.  They created the path and now it’s up to us to walk down it and create the future.”

Ousmane was born twenty-seven years ago in a village called Tin-Zaouaten, a solitary speck squeezed up against Mali’s northeastern border with Algeria.  It’s a remote marginal place.   Or to put it another way: there’s distant, there’s remote and beyond both of those there’s Tin-Zaouaten.

To an outsider, the village would appear to be nothing more than a motley collection of one-storey adobe and breezeblock houses, huddling together for protection against the burning sun, the black rocky hills and the lonely immensity of the surrounding desert.   But to Ousmane, it’s home.

Like its ‘neighbour’ Tessalit, two hundred and fifty kilometres to the west, Tin-Zaouaten is blessed with a water table that lurks benignly just below the surface of the gritty soil.  Dig a few metres and you can usually find water in abundance.   That’s why Tin-Zaouaten, or ‘Tinza’ for short, is famed in the desert for its gardens and garden produce. Ousmane’s father Mossa was born a nomad out in the bush, but by the time Ousmane arrived he had settled in Tinza, making a living from growing onions, beetroot, carrots and dates, and selling them in the local markets.

Ousmane Tamikrest & Abaraybone Tinariwen

In 1985 drought shook desert life to its core. The rains had failed for several seasons and the village was haunted by famine. “I was born in a time of calamity,” says Ousmane. “In the middle of dreadful events for the Touareg people.  My parents knew so much hardship. Then when I was five years old the rebellion broke out. It was 1990, the year of war. I was a child, and I used to hide in amongst the rocks with the other women and children, just a few kilometres north of the village over the Algerian border. When I think of that time, it’s as if it’s all still happening in front of me.”

Thus Ousmane’s childhood was buffeted by the searing winds of recent Touareg history. The droughts of ‘68 to ’74 almost destroyed the animal herds and with them the ancient nomadic way of life of the Touareg. The drought of ’84 to ’85 almost dealt the final blow. Thousands of young men fled into exile in Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso and beyond. That’s where the modern Touareg guitar style of music was born and then nourished by anger, homesickness, frustration and dreams of a better life. It was this generation of Touareg men, known as the ishumar, who returned to Mali and Niger in 1990 to rebel against the callousness, corruption and arrogance of the governments in the distant capitals of Bamako and Niamey.

At first Ousmane just listened to traditional Touareg music at home, and the newer guitar music on battered old cassettes. “I well remember hearing my first Tinariwen songs. I was about five. After the death of my mother, my father was obliged to take me to live with my grown-up sister.  One morning I was sitting in front of the house and this guy walked by singing a song by Inteyeden called ‘Imidiwan Kel Hoggar’ (‘My Friends the Hoggar People’).  It went straight into my brain…ha ha ha.”

A few years later Ousmane began to play the guitar himself, and write songs.  He was attending a school in Tinza called Les Enfants de l’Adrar, set up by a French NGO and a local man turned community leader called Hama Ag Sid Ahmed. At the end of every school year the children would create and perform musical plays about pressing themes like ignorance, drought, education and culture.

Hama bought the school an acoustic guitar, and Ousmane adopted the instrument. With his constant friend Cheikh Ag Tiglia, he would write songs and perform them at the school shows. He learned the Tamashek guitar style by listening to a particular cassette which Tinariwen’s leader Ibrahim ‘Abaraybone’ had recorded in Algeria back in 1998.

In 2002, events once again undermined the tenuous calm and stability in Tinza.  The village was home to one of the southern desert’s most infamous freedom fighters and warlords, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga. For this reason it became a military no-go zone. Ousmane’s father left to live with his eldest sons in Libya, and both Ousmane and Cheikh went south to Kidal

Kidal is the capital of the far north east of Mali, a region known as the Adagh des Iforas (‘The Mountains of the clan Iforas’). With its wide sandy streets and dispersed one storey earthen houses, Kidal has the feel of a frontier town. For the Adagh Touareg, it’s where it all happens.

Tamikrest: 'Adagh'

Ousmane and Cheikh played the guitar and sang in hidden corners of Kidal, around a fire, drinking bittersweet Touareg tea with their friends. Their reputations grew very slowly, steadily, without wild leaps or fanfares. After a while they heard that a local cultural centre called the DDRK or ‘Maison du Luxembourg’, founded by the Duchess of Luxembourg who had fallen in love with the town when she visited it in 2001, was offering music classes. The teacher turned out to be Juhan Ecaré, a musician from Ivory Coast.

Then this French theatre troupe called La Calma arrived in town and enrolled over fifty young people to perform a massive theatre piece featuring sketches about a host of local issues.  It went down a storm in January 2006 at a local festival called ‘The Saharan Nights of Essouk’.   Although Ousmane didn’t take part in the project, claiming disinterest in theatre (“I’m a musician…theatre’s not my thing”), Cheikh went along and played with a local percussionist called Aghaly Ag Mohammedine and a bass player called Ibrahim Ahmed, aka ‘Pinnochio’ or ‘Pino’ for short.

On their return, Pino proposed that they form a proper band and record a demo at a small studio, which had been set up at the Maison du Luxembourg. They also decided that they needed a name, and agreed on ‘Tamikrest’, which means the knot, the junction, the coalition, in Tamashek, the language of Touareg.   “Each of us came from a different place, a different zone,” explains Ousmane.  “Cheikh and I from Tinza. Aghaly and Mossa Maiga from Kidal. Pino from Gao.  But we found each other and we had the same ideas, the same intentions.  We were like a coalition.”

On the 23^rd May 2006, the army garrison in Kidal was attacked by a new Touareg rebel movement called the Alliance Démocratique pour le Changement (ADC). “It was a hard time for me,” remembers Ousmane. “I woke up early that morning and discovered that the town had turned into a nightmare. Those who wanted to join the rebels had already done so. But, in general, that wasn’t the choice of me and my friends. Because we’d never been in the army. We were musicians, not people who carry arms.”

By the end of the year a fragile peace had been restored, although Tinza’s recalcitrant son Ibrahim Ag Bahanga refused to compromise and remained on the run with his own splinter militia. Tamikrest performed at the peace Forum in March 2007, when the Touareg rebels met with the Malian government and thousands of community representatives in Kidal to map out a way forward.

The group were developing their style and their fan base, which consisted mainly of Kidal’s younger generation. They knew the Tamashek guitar style intimately, but they were also deeply into rap, metal, Maghrebi pop and afro-disco music from Ivory Coast. They had new tastes, new desires, new ambitions and Tamikrest was their band.

Pino was quite the mover and shaker. In late 2007 he contacted Manny Ansar, the director of the now world-famous Festival in the Desert and clinched a gig for Tamikrest. The band found the money to transport themselves the 600 miles eastward to Timbuktu.  In the silky dunes of Essakane they met Dirtmusic, a group of rock’n’roll veterans from the USA and Australia. It was one of those meetings fashioned by fate in destiny’s workshop.

Chris Eckman of Dirtmusic remembers the meeting thus: “On our first morning in Essakane we woke up hearing music, so we went across the sand to the tent opposite ours and that’s where Tamikrest was playing.  Chris Brokaw grabbed his dobro and headed over, then Hugo and I eventually did the same and basically for three days we didn’t leave.”

Once again music overflew all barriers of language, culture, style, shyness and reticence. The friendship formed at Essakane grew in the following months and lead to an invitation by Dirtmusic to come to the Malian capital Bamako to make an album, and contribute to Dirtmusic’s own oeuvre. After another epic journey of 1,200 miles, by car and bus, Ousmane, Aghaly and crew entered their first professional studio and ‘Adagh’ was born.

“It felt very natural to play with Dirtmusic,” asserts Ousmane. “I’ve always appreciated all kinds of different music and it was such a pleasure to play with a different kind of band. Music isn’t something you study; it’s something you learn with your ears. I’d been listening and playing along to Bob Marley, to Marc Knopfler and Dire Straits, to Tinariwen for years.  We’d been listening to so much international music and that’s why the marriage with Dirtmusic worked.”

The end of 2009 finds Tamikrest on the cusp of the world and the next chapter in their great adventure. “This opportunity to go to Europe feels like a big responsibility,” says Ousmane. “I feel like someone who’s done this exam and is now waiting for the result. We’ve already achieved quite a bit, but the hardest is still ahead.”

One thing is certain: Ousmane is clear about the band’s mission. “The situation of the Touareg is very difficult right now,” he declares.  “Even before I played the guitar and started recording, I had this ambition to be a lawyer or you might say, an ‘advocate’. I wanted to be capable of expressing the hurt I felt in my heart, and speak out about the situation, even at the United Nations.  Because we’re a people who don’t have journalists, we don’t have lawyers, we don’t have advocates. But it was only later that I realised that a musician can play that role.”

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“What is the weakest part of any nation or people? It’s ignorance. We are stuck in our ignorance. I see the world changing, racing ahead, and leaving us behind.  And the only thing that is holding us back is our ignorance. As artists, it’s our duty to make our problems known to the world, to sing songs about the nomadic life, about our traditions and culture. But above all, revolutionary songs, about what we see, about what the government is doing to our people, which makes no sense to me.”

There it is…Tamikrest, the knot, the coalition, the future.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009

Artist Biog for Glitterhouse Records, Dec 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A tchérot amulet pendant = 1 young camel

Two rings = one kid goat

A small padlock = one goat

A large padlock = two goats

A dagine style bracelet = two goats

A veil weight / padlock key = one goat

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

The origins and character of the artisan blacksmith.

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

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

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

Artisan at Assoc. Assaghan (c) Andy Morgan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewellery and the Artisan in the modern age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Morgan, (c) 2010

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

Festival Security in 2003. (c) Kate Morgan.

The article in Harpers and Queen came as a shock.  “Exotic.”   “Move over Glastonbury.”  “The most remote music festival in the world.”   “The romance.”  To see an event that was born in a spirit of deranged adventure mixed with post-conflict shoestring survival previewed in magazine that epitomizes affluence and the charmed life…I had to double take and double take again.  Six years ago, under the haunting light of a lunar eclipse, the first Festival in the Desert took place on a wide stony plain near the village of Tin Essako, in the deepest desert of the southern Sahara.  We were a motley assortment of musicians, technicians, journalists, ambassadors, duchesses, tourists and friends who travelled to that unfeasibly remote and yet utterly seductive spot to witness this renaissance of cultural pride and hope.  Our hosts, the nomadic Touareg of the Sahara, had latched onto the idea of using their culture to try and extricate themselves from years of rebellion, drought, isolation and underdevelopment.  The Festival was only a means to this end.  We were only a footnote in this wider project.  Harpers and Queen was very far from anyone’s mind.

The humble seed that was planted back in January 2001 has grown into a media bougainvillea of global proportions.  The take-off point came in January 2003 at the third edition of the Festival near the tiny village called Esskane, in the dunes west of Timbuktu.  LoJo, a group from Angers in France who were so instrumental in setting up the first edition of the Festival, came with a team of technicians.  The Sfinks Festival in Belgium added another crew.  They erected a stage of dreams which welcomed a procession of the Sahara’s finest: Tinariwen, Tartit, Tarbiat, Oumou Sangare, Ali Farka Toure, Afel Bocoum, Haira Arby, Seydoum Ould Eide and many more.  A smattering of European ‘names’, including Robert Plant and Ludovico Einaudi, added a frisson of celebrity status.

The 250 strong contingent of whiteys stumbled around in the cream-coloured talcum-powder sand, drenched with sweat and wide-eyed with wonder.  The 1000 or so locals strutted their finest robes, their fanciest turbans, their most magnificent camels and the unearthly sounds of their traditional music.   A CD was recorded on a portastudio set up in a rusting old shipping container.   It sold like hot cakes, and a DVD followed.  Suddenly the Festival became a byword for extreme musical adventurism.  Attendance became a test of sang-froid and derring-do.  Big tour companies started offering all-in packages including first class tent accommodation.   The various ministries in the Malian capital Bamako began to realise that the northern deserts, rather than being a god-forsaken sink hole full of bandits and terrorists, could actually become a very bankable asset  in terms of tourism and cultural kudos.   All this success descended on the bewildered organisers like a sandstorm, at once epic, exhilarating and radically disorientating.

The painful truth is that speedy success dragged along a heap of uninvited problems in its caravan train.  The Malian authorities exerted uncomfortable pressure on Manny Ansar, the President of the EFES Association which was responsible for organising the event. It became official policy to keep the festival alive at all costs, despite spiralling debt, despite the pressure of alien crowds on the fragile desert environment, despite the growing discontent of certain Touareg who felt that the event was being hi-jacked and turned into a kind of Arabian Nights meets Woodstock Of The Sands fantasia.   No one locally could imagine that the Festival was anything other than immensely rich.  But the opposite was true.  The expense of freighting every single piece of equipment and infrastructure in huge burly Mann trucks over the atrocious track that links Essakane to Timbuktu had well nigh bankrupted the event.  Budgets were dismissed as fiction.  Grumbling suspicion became widespread.  Tinariwen, the musical heroes of the rebellion that had shaken desert society to the core in the early 1990s, went back home to Kidal in the far northeast of Mali to set up their own festival, Les Nuits Sahariennes d’Essouk.  They were pining for a return to the original mission; a celebration of desert culture, an event that brings the various different Touareg confederations, from Mali, Niger, Algeria and Libya together for three days of parlaying, problem solving and partying.

The Touareg are unified by a common language, Tamashek, and a common culture rooted in the Berber subsoil of North and West Africa.   But historically the various tribes and factions have often been rivals or even sworn enemies.   It was the rebellion of 1990 to 1991 that broke down these old enmities and forged something approaching a common Touareg destiny.  But old traditions die hard.  As the Festival at Essakane became the talk of the desert, the Touareg of Menaka, Tessalit,  Aguelhoc, In Gall or Agadez wanted a piece of the action.  Why should all the glory go the Kel Antessar, the tribe that rule the Timbuktu region, who have always been the most adept at playing politics and furthering their cause in the corridors of power in Bamako?   After all the original Festival in the Desert was nothing more than one of the Touareg’s annual traditional gatherings, a bit like our country fairs of yore, opened up to participants and audiences from all over the world with the help of some funding, a website, and friends in Europe.  In January of this year there were no less that six desert Festivals in northern Mali: at Essakane, in Essouk, Ashawadj, Gourma, Aguelhoc and Tessalit.   It’s no longer a question of THE Festival in the Desert, but of The FESTIVALS in the Desert.

At this year’s Essouk festival, about 150 nomad tents covered in terracotta stained hides were arranged in a wide crescent along a ridge near the ancient ruins of a medieval metropolis.  The setting was arrestingly grand.  On the sandy plain below was a tiny concrete stage, backed by a huge open sided truck.  The crowds were thinner than they might have been.  Local people were constrained by the fact that the annual feast of Tabeski was only a few days away, and they needed the time to get home and prepare for it.  Tourists had been turned off by a completely misguided message on the Foreign Office website advising against travel in the northern deserts of Mali.   Statistically, the area is about ten times safer than London, Bristol, or the centre of Trowbridge on a Saturday night.  The old myth about the desert being a parched hell-hole inhabited only by Touareg freebooters and renegade Al-Qaida elements still holds swa y in Bamako, and apparently also in the Foreign ministries of the UK, France and the USA.

That’s why the Festivals in the Desert are so important.  They give a region previously ravaged by conflict and insecurity the chance to show a peaceful face to the world.   They give the chance for the Touareg to prove that far from being bandits, they are a simply another African people in the pressure cooker of enforced modernisation, desperately trying to adapt their millennial nomadic culture to the merciless realities of a modern globalised world.  They give adventurous westerners the opportunity to travel to one of the most beautiful places on earth, and hear music whose alien splendour is as difficult to conceive as it is stunning.  And they give the world a chance to ponder how a friendly cultural get together can being some much needed pride, hope and confidence, where bullets and politically inspired machinations have previously failed.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2006
First published in The Independent – Mar 2006

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Ibrahim Ag Alhabib. (c) Nadia Nid El Mourid

I first met Tinariwen in a tent on the wide stony plains of the Tamesna, sixty kilometres due east of Kidal in the far northeastern corner of Mali.  The date was January 6^th 2001 and the occasion was the first Festival in the Desert.  It was my friendship with the French group Lo’Jo that had brought me there.  I was tired, dirty, and elated, floating in the strangely sharp yet magical ether of the Saharan atmosphere.   I had managed to miss the Festival’s official opening the day before, when Tinariwen had taken to the tiny concrete platform that passed for a stage to welcome a convoy of twenty-four 4×4 vehicles carrying the Prime Minister of Mali, four Ambassadors, and an ostentatiously tooled-up escort.  Everyone I spoke to confirmed that Tinariwen were the pied pipers of the region, a band of legendary renown, a band to know.   My instinct was to just let the flow of each succeeding moment carry me away, but a gnawing and neurotic desire to capture those moments for posterity, to maximise journalistic opportunities, led me to ask if I could interview Tinariwen.  A time was fixed, an act which in itself seemed disturbingly incongruous in that timeless place.

When the time came, I ducked under the red leather animal hide covers of a traditional Touareg tent and sat myself down gingerly on a sandy Technicolor floor mat.  The cool and dark space was filled by about seven men, sitting, lounging, cross-legged, squatting, unperturbed, relaxed and minimalist in their movements.  Some were turbaned, others were not.  There was Hassan aka Abin Abin aka the Lion of the Desert, Mohammed aka Japonais, Abdallah aka Catastrophe, Ibrahim aka Abaraybone, Kheddou and other extended members of the crew like Sweiloum, Diarra and Bigga.   They sat immobile like resting fighters, neither aggressive nor overly friendly.  Their calmness and lack of excess…excess talk, excess movement, excess belongings, excess emotion…flustered me.   A tea was being prepared with unforced ritual.  Tea drinking in the Sahara is emblematic of hospitality, friendship and the slow baked pace of things.  I set up my DAT nervously and then asked the dumbest but most obvious question available to the unprepared journalist, “How did it all begin?”   Long pause.   Mild panic.  Tinariwen remained ice cool.   Eventually Japonais began to answer the question in minuscule chunks of guttural and heavily accented French, each punctuated with the phrase “Est ce que tu vois ça?”or “do you get me?”, which sounded more like ‘Iskitiwassa?”   Those bafflingly oriental facial features, which are the source of his nickname, remained sharp and penetrating, Shogun-like, throughout.   Then after about a minute he motioned me to switch off my DAT machine and proceeded to confer with his brothers-in-arms, in Tamashek, the Touareg language.  A full-blown debate started to brew.  There seemed to be disagreements about dates, times, names and places.   Fifteen minutes later the discussion was still raging, and I was still sitting there, largely ignored, with my inactive DAT machine in front of me.  It was almost comical.

It later became clear to me that there were good reasons for this inauspicious start to our relationship.   This was one of the first interviews that Tinariwen had ever conducted and none of the group members had ever felt any great need to straighten out the facts surrounding the band’s genesis.  I was also later to learn, by the slow but ultimately more fruitful method of endless aimless chats over intense cups of bittersweet Touareg tea, that the tale of those early years comprises a complex drama of exile, wandering and the clandestino life, in which fact, memory and nostalgia are entwined like spaghetti in a bowl.

The key actor in that drama was Ibrahim Ag Alhabib.  His nickname ‘Abaraybone’ means something like ‘raggamuffin kid’ or ‘the scruffy tearaway who’s always playing in the dirt’.   During the first Touareg rebellion against the central government of Mali in the early sixties, Ibrahim’s father, a livestock farmer and mason by trade, was apprehended by a unit of the Malian army for giving succour to the rebels, and shot dead.  Ibrahim witnessed his dad’s murder with his own eyes.  He was only four years old.  Ibrahim then left the Adrar des Iforas region of northeastern Mali with his grandmother, and a single cow, the last of a once substantial herd, which the Malian army destroyed, and went into exile in southern Algeria.  The cow died on the way.   Whilst still young, Ibrahim became a wanderer, a survivor, travelling around Algeria and Libya doing odd jobs.  He spent a number years apprenticed to a carpenter in Oran, for example.  He also did a few stints in jail.  It was the quintessential academy of hard knocks education and survival was by any means necessary, or not at all.

In 1979, Ibrahim found himself in the southern Algerian desert oasis of Tamanrasset, a place favoured by exiled Touareg men at the time.  There he hung out with two other Touareg from the Adrar des Iforas region in Mali; Hassan Touhami and Inteyeden Ag Ableline.  A Malian friend of mine once described the kind of life they led as l’amitié autour d’une cigarette (friendship around a cigarette).   I can’t think of a better description.   Since boyhood, Ibrahim had been playing music on self-made bush guitars, which consisted mostly of a jerry can, a stick and some bicycle brake wire.  He’d pluck out traditional Touareg melodies, sometimes adding his own phrases and images to an age-old song, or he’d imitate the north Malian blues guitar style that was already beginning to blossom thanks to mentors like Ali Farka Touré, Boubacar Traoré and a mysterious character called Aziz, whom Tinariwen have often cited as an inspiration.  Ibrahim also owed an almost genetic debt to the undisputed granddaddies of all Sahelian guitar styles, the traditional griots with their hide and gut lutes, which the Songhai call ‘ngoni’, and the Touareg call ‘teherdent’.

Ibrahim would also chuck in other rag-tag influences that had accrued in his mind during his vagabond life: rai music which he’d heard in Oran, the radical new chaabi of Morocco, especially Nass El Ghiwane, who’s songs he can still sing verbatim to this day, non-aligned north African pop stars like Rabah Driassa, western pop stars like Boney M or Kenny Rodgers.  There was no musical mission, just a desire for solace, a means to distract the mind and pass the time.   In Tamanrasset Ibrahim saw his first ever acoustic guitar, and persuaded its owner to give it to him.  Together with Hassan, Inteyeden and two other women singers, Ibrahim formed a little band.   Its first name was very longwinded, but it included the words ‘Taghreft’ and ‘Tinariwen’.   Taghreft is a complex word meaning ‘the rebuilding’, ‘the reconstruction’ or ‘edification’, but also the crew or the community who carry out this regeneration.  Tinariwen is simply the plural of ‘Ténéré’, which means ‘desert’, ‘land’ or ‘empty place’.   Taghreft Tinariwen started to play for the exiled Touareg community…weddings, parties, and campfire reveries…and even managed to clinch an invitation to perform at a festival in Algiers.  They didn’t have the proper equipment so they asked a local Tamanrasset combo called Sawt El Hoggar to help them out.  That’s how Ibrahim got to curl his fingers around the neck of an electric guitar for the first time.   And that’s how a completely new style of music was born.

The crucial point is that the personal adventures of Ibrahim, Hassan, Inteyeden and future members of Tinariwen are faithful microcosms of the wider phenomenon of the ishumaren.  This Tamashek word is derived from the French ‘chomeur’, meaning ‘unemployed’, and it describes a whole generation of Touareg men who were driven from their homes by the droughts of ’73 and ’85, as well as by political conflict and lack of opportunity, to go and find work in neighbouring states like Libya and Algeria.  This epic displacement transformed Touareg society and forced it to confront the modern world.  Old hierarchies of tribes, clans and families, in which each person knew their place and their duty, were completely devastated.  Men who were descended from generations of nomadic animal herders and traders were forced to work for money for the first time.  Old tribal enemies were now united by suffering and common political motives.  Many young Touareg men exchanged the utter silence of their desert home for the bustle of modern cities.  And they heard music from Europe, America and other parts of the Arabic world that they never even knew existed.

The camps which were set up by Khadafy in Libya to welcome hordes of these errant young Touareg in the early 1980s were run along brutish military lines.  The Libyan and Chadian trainers could be ruthless.  Khadafy had a vision of a mercenary Islamic army that would further his revolutionary and territorial ambitions in places like Niger, Chad and the Middle East.  The young Touareg however were told that they were being trained up to liberate themselves and eventually create their own autonomous Touareg nation in the middle of the Sahara.  This lie became more and more apparent towards the end of the 1980s, especially when Khadafy started to negotiate the repatriation of Touareg from Niger directly with the Nigerien government.   In any case, the idea of an Arabic Islamic regiment ultimately held little appeal to the Touareg, who were increasingly proud of their distinctly African and Berber origins.

During this time, Taghreft Tinariwen, as they were still known, started to take on the role of the musical voice of the ishumaren.  The revolutionary Touareg movement, the MPA (Mouvement Populaire de l’Azawad), and it’s charismatic leader Iyad Ag Ghali, saw the potential in fostering the group’s talent, and provided money for basic equipment and a rehearsal space.  With no Tamashek language newspapers, magazines, radio or TV stations in existence, Tinariwen’s songs carried the message of hope, struggle, pain, exile and nostalgia to the Tamashek speaking people.  It was a cassette-to-cassette ghetto-blaster grapevine.  The audio quality was as atrocious as the message was powerful.   It was an electrified sound and thus appealed to a youth that were wrestling with modernity.  It was rock’n’roll.

But it would be a mistake to ever reduce Tinariwen to one-dimensional propagandists.  Their message was always more about the rebellion of the soul that the rebellion of the Kalashnikov and bullet.  Their songs freeze frame the young Touareg everyman, exiled from his homeland, forced into meaningless labour, pining for his home, his family, his mother and his sisters.  And in that sense, their music is also intensely personal.  The older members including Ibrahim, Hassan, Japonais, Kheddou, Inteyeden and Abdallah, did take part in the rebellion which broke out in Niger in the summer of 1990.  An ex-rebel once told me that he well remembers Ibrahim and Abdallah entertaining their fellow fighters in a secret bush camp on the night of the now legendary attack a the police post in Menaka, a skirmish which kicked off the rebellion in Mali in June 1990.  Like almost every other European or North American I was initially dazzled by these stories of ‘real’ rebellion and I’d admit to putting excessive emphasis on them when we started promoting Tinariwen in Europe.  Prolonged contact with the band has since wised me up.  It’s clear that the rebellion is a mute subject for them, one that harbours a great deal of pain and bad memories.  There was adventure, and there was heroism too, but in the end, the actual conflict was but a brief episode in a long struggle which is full of unexpected shade and subtlety.  In every real world conflict the distinction between good guys and bad guys is never as blatant as sensationalising journalists would like it to be.  The Touareg rebellion was no exception.

When peace finally came to the southern Sahara with the ritual burning of more that 3,000 small arms at The Flame of Peace in Timbuktu in 1996, Ibrahim, Hassan et al refused offers of reintegration into the Malian army or administration and decided to make a go of being full time musicians.  Some of the extended Tinariwen family (and that’s precisely what Tinariwen has always been, an extended musical family of friends who form little sub-groups to tour and record when opportunity knocks), like Kheddou and Foy Foy did accept jobs offered by the Malian government under the UN sponsored post-conflict reintegration programme. Tinariwen emerged from the rebel underground as a working group and they were welcomed like a heroic mystery finally unveiled.  Thanks to that portentous meeting with the French band Lo’Jo in Bamako in 1998, the Tinariwen phenomenon started to spread beyond their southern Saharan home, slowly at first but now with increasing momentum.   It started with a brief tour of France in 1999 and that first Festival in the Desert, followed by their debut CD, ‘Radio Tisdas’, their latest, ‘Amassakoul’, tours of Europe and USA, accolades and the modern nomadism of the struggling musician.   Where all of this is leading, none of us know.

Managing a legendary group from the southern Sahara is no piece of cake.  You’re constantly having to explain the apparent absurdities of the western music industry, with its voracious and fickle media machine, its painfully slow money flows and its time and paper obsessed ways of operating, to people who feel more comfortable with a smile, a handshake, immediate payment for a job well done and an ‘I’ll make it if I can’ outlook.  But I have to say that working with Tinariwen has been a joy.  Somehow the pervasive toughness of life in the desert, where to complain about discomfort is taboo, has knocked any hint of prissy prima-donna behaviour out of the band.  No doubt those Libyan army sergeants also had something to do with it.  If the gear needs to be loaded into the van at three in the morning on a pissing cold night in Manchester, then Tinariwen is equal to the task.  Compared to the life of a nomad in the bleak hills of the Adrar des Iforas, it’s nothing.

But above all the pleasure has been in getting better acquainted with a remarkable bunch of characters; Ibrahim with his intense reserve and melancholy which more than occasionally get swept away by a magnetic friendliness, which is awkward, guileless and very appealing all at once; Hassan with his rock solid sense of humor reminding you that laughter is the strongest weapon of all; Abdallah with his Errol Flynn smile, his self-deprecating quips, his uncharacteristic chattiness; Eyadou with his simple straight-forward friendliness; Sarid with his cheeky desert dude charms and unassailable grin; Elaga with his slightly spaced out look and quiet mischievousness; Mina, the princess, who doesn’t even have to make any kind of effort to emboy all the beauty and grace of Touareg womanhood.  And there isn’t even the space to praise the qualities of the ‘resting’ members of the band, like Japonnais, Kheddou, Foy Foy or Sweiloum.  When Tinariwen launch into one of their songs on one of their good nights…let’s say ‘Amassakoul’, or ‘Amidinin’ or ‘Chatma’…I’m immediately transported to the place they come from.  My nostrils prick up to the smell of tea, tobacco and gasoline.  The pentatonic drone of the music rolls out the endless line of the desert horizons.  The perpetual polyrhythms put wanderlust back into my heart and my feet.  The slashing guitars remind me of the bewitching harshness of those stony plains, and the gritty truths of recent desert history.  The flowing robes and cheches or turbans of the band remind of the equally bewitching beauty and poise for which the Touareg are justifiably renowned.  And the lyrics, as far as I understand them, remind me that there’s more to this band than I can possibly ever grasp or know.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009

First published in Songlines – Feb 2007

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