Riders On The Storm

Tinariwen took to the hills, attacking convoys, their guitar’s father murdered by government troops. Then they realized their hypnotic desert-blues was their most powerful weapon. ANDY GILL travels to West Africa to meet them. Word of advice, old boy: don’t touch the goat.

The airport at Mopti is basically a warehouse shed surrounded by trinkets. As soon as you set foot outside the shed, a hubbub of hawkers swoops, desperate to flog you a Dogon hat or a necklace camel’s teeth. Not that I can buy anything, even if I wanted to: when I try changing sterling into CFAs, the local currency, I find the bureau de change accepts only Euros. I am stuck in the middle of Africa with no money.

Luckily, I’m with friends – a group of European journalists who’ve come to Mali to meet Tinariwen, the enigmatic band of Tuareg nomads whose captivating desert-blues music has provided a rallying-point for young Tuaregs since the ‘80s. Founded in the rebel training camps provided by Colonel Gaddafi for his Berber brothers, Tinariwen grew out of informal campfire jams, some of which were taped on boomboxes, duplicated and passed around like samizdat pamphlets. Indeed, there was a time when possession of a Tinariwen cassette was considered a seditious act. Nowadays, they sell tens of thousands of albums across the world, and hope to increase that to six figures with their new release Aman Iman – Water Is Life. Like its predecessor Amassakoul (Traveller), it features guttural lead vocals prompting affirmative responses from the backing singer in mesmeric, mantra-like exchanges that match perfectly the hypnotic guitar figures and camel-gait rhythms built around percussion beds of darabuka and handclaps.

The political situation has become more relaxed since the repressive government was replaced by a more liberal regime; but there are still sporadic rebellions, the most recent of which occurred last May, when a small rebel force attacked the army barracks in Kidal. An armoured division was immediately sent north to quash the uprising, but before it arrived, the rebels took off for the hills. An accord was brokered by Algeria in June, but 3000 rebels remain in the hills, and a substantial army presence continues to be garrisoned in Kidal.

Which is exactly where we are headed in four Toyota Landcruisers, the modern ship of the desert. The British contingent seems to have drawn the short straw, traveling in a dilapidated grey vehicle with a cracked windscreen, wires hanging out of the dashboard, no radio and no interior light. Seatbelts? Ha! We are soon barreling along the country’s main highway in the direction of Gao, several hundred kilometers away on the Niger River. Hours later, we turn off the road and make camp for the night. Before long a pot is on the boil. Tonight’s dinner is pasta with goat, which is OK, even though the pasta is under-salted and about an hour beyond al dente.

The next day we reach Gao, a town big enough to boast several internet cafes. There, we have a radio fitted in the Landcruiser, and stock up on local cassettes by such as Ali Toure Farka (sic), along with some of the early Tinariwen bootlegs from the ‘80s. We also purchase our cheches, the turban headgear made from three metres of muslin wound around the head, vital protection from both sun and sand. The indigo one I select is, I’m told, the favoured colour of the Tuaregs – the blue dye that stains the face serves as sun-block, imparting the blueish-brown complexion that led to them becoming known as “the blue men”. I, on the other hand, just look like Papa Smurf.

Beyond Gao there is no road, just broad swathes of desolate scrubland criss-crossed with tyre tracks. But the drivers seem to know where they’re going, tearing along at upwards of 60mph over terrain putted with potholes, dotted with large boulders, spiny trees and spinier shrubs, and with sudden tranches of deep sand in which the vehicle fishtails about wildly. With no seatbelts, we are bouncing around inside the cabin like lottery balls. The Landcruiser, a rally-winning desert specialist, was built for this. But I wasn’t. I was built for comfort, and as my brain rattles about inside myskull, I can feel an attack of labyrinthitis coming on. It is an indication of things to come: by the return journey a week later, I will transformed into The Human Fountain, a puking, trembling wreck, and seriously worrying whether I will actually make it back alive.

It may be one of the toughest vehicles in the world, but by the time we reach Kidal, we’ve broken two of the Landcruisers, their sturdy suspensions snapped like twigs. Too sick to eat, I try to get some sleep. When I wake up, someone has thoughtfully left a plate of food by my bed. Cold pasta with goat. Thanks, but no thanks.

In daylight, Kidal is grim and brown. The road are just brown dirt, and most of the buildings are constructed of mud bricks made from the same brown dirt. Goats wander around, nibbling at piles of rubbish. There are lots of soldiers hanging about, toting their guns and giving off bad vibes. It’s a relief when we climb back into the Landcruisers and head for the desert to camp out for a few nights.

Around the campfire, as a cauldron of goat pasta bubbles away, Tinariwen’s four guitarists sit on tiny practice amps and start jamming, their guitar lines interweaving hypnotically. Abdallah Ah Housseyni is a fine blues guitarist, deftly peeling off fluid licks over Elaga Al Hamid’s rhythmic chops, but it is the band’s charismatic frontman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib whose sound defines the band, his spiralling lines punctuated by little hammered-off curlicues as they roll over and over in mesmeric, cyclical patterns. These days, the band have condensed their pieces into manageable three- or four-minute songs, but in this informal setting, one glimpses the Tinariwen of the ‘80s, when their skeins of guitar would entwine for 20 or 30 minutes at a time, the African equivalent of the Dead doing Dark Star. “Basically,” says their manager Andy Morgan, “Tinariwen is a jam session that has lasted for 25 years.”

The next day, Tinariwen put on a concert for a hundred or so nomad, who materialize from the desert scrubland on foot or in 4x4s. In front of a crescent-shaped Berber tent made of animal hides, the band weave their cyclical magic whilst tall, elegant Tuareg youths shout encouragement, and women keen their approval in long, piercing ululations. In front of the band are a couple of mats, upon which the braver youths assemble in a line to dance. It’s a courtly kind of process, quite funky in its own way, with restrained, subtle foot movements. Sometimes they are joined by a few women who dance opposite them, signifying interest. I get the impression that I’m witnessing one brief moment in a long but abbreviated courtship process, whose participants encounter each other only a few times a year.

That night, there are bits of potato in the goat pasta. A treat!

Back in Kidal, I phone home. The foreign office website, my wife tells me, is advising people not to travel east Gao, where there is apparently a risk of kidnap. That’s exactly where we are, I reply, but don’t worry – we’re with the side that would probably be doing the kidnapping. Somehow this fails to reassure her. Later on, our party visits Kidal marketplace, where a man is butchering a leg of goat on a butcher’s block. The meat seems alive, a wriggling blur – and then we realize it is thronged with literally thousands of flies. That night the goat pasta is virtually untouched.

Most of our time in Kidal is spent lounging around the yard of Hassan, another of Tinariwen’s founders, whose singing, dancing and clapping mark him out as the Bez of the band. After five days of goat pasta twice daily, vitamin deficiency and lack of salt is taking its toll, and I’m feeling increasingly faint, unable to do much more than sleep. I do, however, manage to interview Ibrahim, a natural-mystic soul rebel in the vein of Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, who, appropriately enough, resembles a blend of all three.

When Ibrahim was four, his father was killed by government troops, so he fled with his grandmother to Algeria, where he grew up into a disaffected teenager doing menial jobs to survive in towns like Oran and Tamanrasset. So when Gaddafi offered to train up a Tuareg rebel force, he was one of the first founding members of Tinariwen.

“Throughout my youth, I had this strong desire for revenge,” Ibrahim explains. “So when the MPLS (Mouvement Populaire de Liberation l’Azawad) began gaining support, I got involved, specifically with the idea of seeking revenge for my father. The training gave me some skills – self-discipline, endurance – which serve me well when I am traveling. But I long ago realized that I was a musician and poet, and that these were better weapons with which to achieve what I wanted.”

Ibrahim didn’t return home for 26 years until 1990, and when he did he found his reputation had preceded him, and that he was under surveillance by the police.

“I was walking down the street in Tessalit when I saw two of my friends being bundled into the back of a police vehicle,” he recalls. “So I immediately returned to Algeria. Whilst on my way back, I heard that Iyad Ag Ghali had begun the rebellion, which was in progress by the time I returned. I joined them, living in the hills, attacking convoys and so on.” It was during this time that the great legend of Tinariwen – involving them riding in to battle with Kalashnikovs in their hands and Stratocasters across their back – was first coined. All true, he confirms. But it wasn’t just the government that he and his friends wanted to change.

“When we were young, we wanted to create a new Tuareg society, decoid of the archaic feudal hierarchies,” he says. “We wanted to establish a meritocract, so that jobs and positions would be decided by talent rather than birth. We wanted to educate the population to that our people could live in the modern world, and be effective on an international scale and end our isolation.” For years, the Tuareg tribal chiefs had disdained education, resulting in a crippling cultural inarticulacy: for years, their plight remained unreported, simply because there was nobody to tell their side of the story.

The roots of the conflict go back to the granting of independence in the late ‘50s, when the new socialist government imposed collectivist economic measures inimical to Tuareg herdsmen: instead of selling salt or animals to whoever they wanted at a mutually agreed price, they had to sell them to the state, at an imposed price. Yet the state offered little in return, a situation still apparent in the Kidal region, where there is no hospital for 300 kilometres and the glaring absence of a proper road for several hundred kilometers.

The first Tuareg rebellion was in 1963, since when there have been sporadic uprisings to remind the government of their duties under the various Accords through which the Tuareg have clawed back a measure of federal autonomy. But the old animosities linger. On one visit to Gao, another of the band’s founders, Kheddou, was recognized as one of the Tinariwen rebels and attacked by a mob who doused him in petrol. Only a malfunctioning lighter saved him from being burned alive.

Although Ibrahim’s early songs were largely political – itself a revoluntionary change in a culture whose songs had always been traditional – in recent years his themes have become more spiritual and poetic.

“In the beginning, I felt the need to write songs with a direct message for the Tuareg people,” he says, “trying to wake them up to their own situation and rally support to do something about it. Now, my songwriting has evolved into a much more varied area, to do with traveling and nostalgia and friends and love and the desert. We talk a lot about the tenere, the desert land (and singular form of Tinariwen which means ‘people of the desert’). It is a place where there is nothing, where one is very much along with the wind and the stars.”

It’s not just a case of lip-service being paid to nomadic traditions, either: Ibrahim, who has no house, spends much of his time along in the desert, communing with the spirits.

“When I go out into the bush alone late at night, I sometimes get this powerful feeling of a presence around me,” he says. “I connect with it in an ecstatic way, and find I can create things, like music, more easily. It’s almost like being a different person. Things come into my head – images, music – that don’t come during my normal state of mind. Ali Farka Toure often claimed that his muses were the water spirits of the Niger River. It’s a very similar thing for me in the desert – there’s this other world that is constantly present, and that’s what I commune with out there.”

He’s certainly right about the desert being a place where there is nothing; and in all honesty, there’s not much more than that in desert townships. But as Tinariwen’s music confirms, it’s exactly this kind of deprivation that sharpens the creative edge. Compared to most transatlantic bands, corrupted by the weasel notion of “choice” that affords merely endless varieties of distraction, there is a focus and poetic power to Tinariwen’s work that cuts straight through to the emotional core of the matter. Clearly, the less you have weighing you down, the higher your spirit can soar.