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Sands of fate
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Guardian Unlimited, Sands of fate >>
By Peter Culshaw
It is the hour before sundown in the desert town of Kidal and Ibrahim Ag Alhabib - aka 'the ragamuffin kid', as his nickname translates from the Tamashek - is talking about his previous incarnation as a guerilla fighter. Is it true that during the Tuareg rebellion that started in 1990, he waged war against the Malian government with a Kalashnikov and a Stratocaster strapped across each shoulder? 'That's exactly what happened,' he says softly.
Ibrahim looks like Keith Richards's younger cousin and is the charismatic star of Tinariwen, the most thrilling act in world music right now. Their third album threatens to turn them into bona fide rock stars. But Ibrahim also waged war against the government from this outwardly inhospitable corner of eastern Mali.
The Tuareg are the descendants of tribesmen described by Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC and ran the trans-Saharan trade routes for more than two millennia. Known as the Blue People, because indigo dye in their shawls stained their skin, they kept black slaves, rode camels and were simultaneously feared across vast swathes of this part of Africa and mythologised in the West.
The rhetoric of rebellion is embedded in the DNA of rock music, and tales of Tinariwen's involvement in the Tuareg struggle for liberation - following independence for Niger, Mali, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso in the 1960s - have added to their own mystique. The truth is inevitably complex and to find it necessitates a bone-jarring journey to what is still rebel territory.
DAY ONE
Our party meets at Mopti's fly-blown airport in central Mali before a long journey eastwards. The first night is spent camping under a brilliant sky ('welcome to the billion-star hotel') with the first of too many meals of pasta and goat stew. The next morning the Toyota Land Cruiser reaches Gao, the last town before the desert proper. Supplies are bought: water, petrol, coffee and cigarettes. There are no more Marlboro Lights, only the full-strength Red variety, and henceforth just a wretched local brand, called Business - a measure of our distance from contemporary Western lifeIt was at the inaugural Festival in the Desert - a celebration of Tuareg culture in Timbuktu in 2001 - that Tinariwen came to the attention of the West. Robert Plant was a visitor and returned saying that 'listening to Tinariwen is like dropping a bucket into a deep well' - hinting that the connection between the blues of the Mississippi Delta and West Africa might travel further and encompass Tinariwen's atavistic brand of rock'n'roll.
In 2004, the band's album Amassakoul received rave reviews and they toured Europe and America. 'They were playing pentatonic music, scales people were used to rather than weird Arabic melodies,' says their English manager Andy Morgan, explaining the thrill of recognition in their welcome. Fans included Thom Yorke and Carlos Santana, with whom the band jammed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. 'They are a close unit, and are the only band I know who actually ask to share rooms in hotels on tour, rather than be on their own,' says Morgan. 'We prefer a room with a balcony where we can brew up some mint tea and look at the sky,' Ibrahim tells me later. 'It's just a different type of nomadic existence for us.'
Plant's guitarist Justin Adams produced their new album, Aman Iman ('Water is Life'), in Mali's capital Bamako last year. 'What did the overall sound remind me of?' Adams writes in the sleeve notes. 'The Velvets? Sonic Youth? Howling Wolf in maximum fuzz mode? All of the above, but African, always African.' The songs address Tuareg history and their plight, as well as love and the desert spirits or djinns.
Now signed to the same label as Travis, Tinariwen deserve their chance, even if they still base themselves in the remote Saharan region known as the Adrar des Iforas. It is 10 hours after leaving Gao, driving on dirt tracks across the sand and scrub, swerving past holes and speeding camels, that we reach the town of Kidal.
In 1963, the first Tuareg rebellion erupted from this area. 'It was bad enough being ruled by the French, but now we were being ruled by some blacks in Bamako we didn't even know,' one Tuareg tells me (there was racism on both sides). The insurgency lasted for three years, and the victims included four-year-old Ibrahim's father, killed by government troops. 'For a long time,' Ibrahim says, 'I had a very strong sense of anger and loss and wanted vengeance.' The soldiers destroyed the livestock which was their entire livelihood, too.
In May 1990, Tuareg in both Mali and Niger claimed autonomy for their traditional homeland. Thousands were left dead in the conflict that followed, which ended only in 1996 when a bonfire of weapons went up in flames at a peace ceremony in Timbuktu. Fighting flared near Kidal as recently as last May, led by a renegade Tuareg colonel who claimed the government had reneged on aid promises. The view from Bamako is, of course, different. As development consultant Violet Diallo puts it: 'There's no doubt that the first Malian government after independence in 1960 was extremely hostile to the Tuareg, but in the last decade things have got a lot better.'
After last year's trouble, the military are back in numbers in the area, wearing opaque shades and waving machine guns at numerous check-points. Yet some of them are Tuareg and friends of Tinariwen and we are waved past. One tells me that a number of people have left the town and are living in the hills - and it feels like a ghost town here. The only club in town, unpromisingly named La Grotte, is dead, with just two locals nursing cooling beers.
DAY TWO
At the compound belonging to guitarist Alhassane Ag Touhami, known to all as Hassan, I finally meet the group. Hassan seems surprisingly gentle for someone whose nom de guerre was 'The Lion of the Desert'. His elegant wife in flowing Tuareg robes serves mint tea, while their small child crawls on the floor. Talking to four members of the group and their friend, Dicko, who was educated at college in Bamako, the bones of Tinariwen's own epic story are revealed.
Ibrahim, Hassan and the band's third guitarist Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni were all born in nomadic camps in the desert in Mali, but were driven by drought and conflict into exile in Algeria in the late 1970s. There they joined a generation of increasingly radicalised Tuareg known as the Ishumaren ('the unemployed'), who questioned the old hierarchies and the failure of their previous rebellion.
Ibrahim says it was in Algeria that he saw a film of Jimi Hendrix, heard the radical Moroccan group Nass El Ghiwane and managed to get his hands on an electric guitar. Before then he had used a jerry can, a stick and some bicycle brake wire to fashion an instrument. Between odd jobs - he was a carpenter in Oran - and time in jail, he put together the first version of Tinariwen.
When Libya's Colonel Gaddafi offered the Tuareg military training, three members of the group, including Ibrahim, went to a camp. There they forged a revolutionary style marrying elements of rock to Tuareg melodies and rhythms. 'When we heard Robert Plant and Carlos Santana we never imagined we would one day meet them,' Ibrahim tells me.
The Tuareg liberation movement and its charismatic leader Iyad Ag Ghali provided equipment and rehearsal space. In the absence of Tamashek newspapers and radio and TV, Tinariwen's music was copied from ghetto blaster to ghetto blaster, spreading a message of solidarity like bushfire.
In 1990, Ibrahim became Iyad Ag Ghali's driver. The Tuareg ambushed convoys, attacked the police and army posts and sped back to the remotest desert areas. Keddou from the band still bears the scars of numerous bullet wounds. By this time the band's music had become illegal - you could be arrested for possessing one of their tapes.
Days three, four and five
We travel further into the desert. When we stop in one of the few places with the shelter of scrubby trees, one of the band reveals a portable DVD player and we watch the Coen brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou?. Abdallah, the most laid-back member of the band, tells me the only Americans he had seen until he was a teenager were in westerns in the cinema in exile in Algeria. 'I thought all Americans were cowboys who smoked cigars.'
When the sun is slightly less intense, we set up camp. It's a ritual for the next three nights - goat stew and pasta and then, around the fire when it gets dark, the band get out their instruments. Guitars are plugged into battery-driven amps, and soon their trance-inducing numbers flow into one another. At such moments any journey seems worth it. There's no alcohol, only the occasional desert spliff.
Then there are late-night conversations about the mysteries of the desert. Ibrahim talks about 'un autre monde de magie, d'esprit .... I go out into the desert and I always get a powerful feeling of a presence around me. Sometimes I get an incredible fear, as though there's something next to me. But it's then I get visions, images and music comes into my head. The other world is communicating with me, the world of the djinns.'
Dicko tells me that contact with the ancestors is important for the Tuareg, who are nominally Muslims but incorporate animist, pre-Islamic elements into their belief system. 'The best way is either through a lizard or sometimes we send a group of 13-year-old girls into a tent for a few days to speak to them. The ancestors reveal themselves in different ways - a girl may draw something or in trance speak with their voices.' And what happens if the ancestors don't talk to the girls? 'Then they come home again.'
The only permanent woman member of the band is the singer Mina, who doesn't come out to the desert with the others. Dicko claims the warrior culture of the Tuareg is not as macho as it might seem: 'It's a matriarchal society where inheritance comes through the mothers' line, where women can sue for divorce and, if the divorce goes ahead, she gets to keep the tent.' Unlike other societies from this part of Africa, female circumcision is not practised. Divination is another ancient art. 'Some women are able to fill up a bowl of water on the night of the full moon, and can tell the future from the reflections,' says Dicko.
I ask Ibrahim about his spiritual beliefs. 'Islam is something I've inherited from my parents,' he says, 'but religion is a personal matter.' He insists he has no truck with fundamentalism, although the French newspaper Libération has claimed that Colonel Hassan Fugaga, who led last May's fighting, had trained in a camp in Pakistan. Dicko insists any link with al-Qaeda is 'completely ridiculous'.
'I was with the band when they heard this and they fell about laughing,' says Andy Morgan. 'They said they knew him well and he'd never been further than Gao.'
Just as the band are taking Tuareg culture out into the world, the world is moving in on them. The Chinese are in Mali ( they have built a bridge near Gao, for instance); Japanese oil companies are prospecting; the Saudis are building mosques, the Pakistanis have sent preachers; the Europeans are sending music journalists. Even if the Tuareg wanted to remain aloof from the world, it is becoming impossible.
Ibrahim tells me that modernity has it dangers, too. The ishumar generation wanted to change society (not unlike the baby boomers in the West), but he is concerned that modernity means that some of the old culture is dying out - the Tuareg alphabet, for instance, and a tradition of epic poetry.
'For us, survival has been the main issue; you need leisure time to learn and research and keep these things going' he says. Tinariwen and Dicko have, however, set up a cultural association, which, especially if their record makes money, will be one of their main priorities.
Ibrahim isn't ambitious in a conventional way - the key member of the band, he doesn't even always tour. 'There are things I'd like - a mobile studio to record the old Tuareg music, for example,' he says. 'But the fewer things you have the freer you are.'
How does he feel now that the wider world is discovering his music?
'It's something that was a secret dream when we appealed to the Tuareg youth - that our music might speak to the oppressed everywhere in the world.'
We escape the magical desert, despite the Land Cruiser breaking down in the middle of nowhere, and after two days reach Mopti again. But for Tinariwen, it will always be different. 'I can never leave here,' says Ibrahim. 'Even when we are touring in Europe the desert is always with me.' It is conflict that he has left behind. 'It is an obligation and duty to protect one's own,' he said once late evening, 'but I went through a war that rid me of many of my feelings. My sincere aspiration is for peace.' And now? 'Now, I will fight with music.' · Amar Iman (Independiente) is out now 02/18/07 >> go there
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