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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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.

The post TAMIKREST – The coalition, the knot, the future appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

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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