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Rock Warriors (feature story)
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Hamilton Spectator, Rock Warriors (feature story) >>
-by Andy Gill
The Tuareg tribesmen of the Sahara have, something along the lines of " Patience comes from God, haste comes from the devil."
I wish somebody had told our Tuareg driver.
The saying, doubtless well-suited to life lived at camel's pace under the scorching sun, is rather less pertinent when you're tearing across the desert at upwards of 90 kilometres an hour in that latter - day ship of the the Toyota Landcruiser.
There's only one main road linking the populous southern part of Mali, around the capital Bamako, with our destination, way up in the north-east - and we left the road behind at Gao, on the Niger River.
From there, it's another 320 kilometres across desert scrubland littered with boulders and trees bearing spines the size of toothpicks, to Kidal, the home base ofTinariwen, the Tuareg band whose latest album Aman Iman (Water Is Life) has just been released.
By the time we reach Kidal, the suspension on two of our four vehicles has broken, their sturdy iron bars snapping like twigs as we bounce over rocks and potholes.
Not for nothing do the Tuareg have another saying: "The desert rules you, you don't rule the desert,"
Frankly, you don't even get a vote.
And nor will the Tuareg if the government down in Bamako has its way.
Back in the winter of 2005, the Itinerant Voting Bureau, set up by the former French colonial administration to cater to the electoral needs of the nomadic tribesmen, was cut by presidential decree, a move regarded in Kidal as a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise the Tuareg.
Six months of ignored complaints later, the Tuareg did what they have done periodically ever since independence was granted back in 1960.
They launched a rebellion.
An army barracks in Kidal was attacked, and arms stolen by the rebels. Five people died.
When reinforcements were sent from Bamako to quash the rebellion, the rebels headed for the hills, where they are invincible, swiftly followed by most of the ordinary townsfolk.
They remembered what had happened back in the uprising of 1963, when many innocent Tuareg were massacred.
Among the dead were the parents of Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, the charismatic, tousle-haired frontman of Tinariwen. Out of spite, the family's herd was also slaughtered and left to rot.
Four-year-old Ibrahim and his grandmother fled on foot into Algeria, where he grew up into a feckless rapscallion, doing menial jobs in Tamanrasset and Oran, and nursing fantasies of revenge.
It was in Tamanrasset that he was first exposed to western rock music, acquiring cassettes of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. It offered a sense of purpose and creative fulfilment to his life, and in 1979, he formed a band with Alhassane Ag Tbuhami and another friend, having taught himself to play on a guitar he'd made from a stick, a can and some wire*
Instead of singing the traditional , they wrote new lyrics about the political situation and the problems facing their embattled culture, which in itself constituted a revolution in Tuareg music.
When Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, keen to foster his vision of a single North African Berber state, offered to train and arm the disgruntled Tuareg exiles and fund their fight for autonomy, Ibrahim and Alhassane were two of the first to sign up.
It was in the Libyan training camps that they acquired the skills that would be put to use in rebellions throughout the 1985, establishing the romantic - but apparently true - legend of Tinariwen riding into battle with Kalashnikovs in their arms and Stratocasters across their backs.
"I got involved specifically with the idea of seeking revenge for my father," explains Ibrahim, "because I don't like the idea of being a soldier at all. I am a musician, not a soldier.
"I did learn some skills, such as self- discipline and endurance, which serve me well when I am travelling. But I had long ago realized that I was a musician and poet, and that these were better weapons with which to achieve what I wanted.
"Since I have grown older, I have learned more. I fought a war, and that helped expunge the desire for revenge.
"Also, the repressive regime that used to rule Mali has changed, and things are changing for the better."
It doesn't seem that way in Kidal when we finally reach there. If the various checkpoints we passed through, manned by sullen, suspicious soldiers, had been disquieting enough, the 900-odd troops still garrisoned in the town, months after the peace accord which resolved the issues behind the May 23 rebellion, mean there is a permanent sense of unease about the town.
As in Sudan, the antipathy has an evident racial, there being no confusing the tall, thin, lighter-skinned, Arab-featured Tuareg with the stockier, black West African soldiers, most of whom are from the Bambara culture of the south.
We load up the Landcruisers and head for the desert to camp out for a few nights. Around campfire, beneath a skyfull of stars, with the three guitarists of Tinariwen jamming long, intertwining blues lines, even the goat pasta seems palatable.
With the camel-gait rhythms and serpentine 'improvisations, they sound like the African equivalent of the Grateful Dead in open-ended mode, unhurriedly pursuing the threads of melody as they uncoil.
"Basically," says the band's English manager Andy Morgan, "Tinariwen is just a jam session that has lasted for 25 years."
He's not exaggerating: In Gao, we had managed to purchase some bootleg Tinariwen cassettes dating back to the 1985, when they were so influential in rousing Tuareg youth to rebellion that mere possession of one was deemed an act of sedition.
Now Ibrahim spends many nights alone in the desert, communing with the spirit "djinns" who he says give him inspiration for his music.
"Alone in the bush, I sometimes get this powerful feeling of a presence around and I find I can create things more easily. Images and music come into my head, like a muse," he says.
"Ali Farka Toure claimed that his muses were the water spirits of the Niger River, and it's a 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 "
The spirit world is very real to the Tuareg, whose origin myth, according to the band's friend and adviser Issa Dicko, involves a sort of spiritual intercourse.
"The first Tuareg was a 'djinn' who wanted to possess a woman," Dicko explains.
"He was the son of a human and a supernatural being. The other African peoples are wary of the Tuareg, because they know there is this supernatural origin, that they are fundamentally different."
Indeed, while the phrase "Kel Tinariwen", from which the band take their name, means "the people of the 'tenere' (desert)", it can also mean "the djinns of the desert" too.
On our second night, Tinariwen stages bush concert for their nomadic tribespeople, who materialize out of the bush like djinns, barrel in aboard 4x4s, all driven with the same maniacal glee as ours.
In front of a crescent-shaped Berber tent, the band slip with casual ease into their set, while onlooking Tuareg womenfolk show their approval in blood-curdling ululations.
For many Tuareg God is Allah, though their form of Islam has little connection to the Saudi or Pakistani strain of the religion.
Indeed, visiting clerics from those countries seeking to convert the Tuareg to their ways have struggled to make any impact at all.
"Well, do you see any mosques out here?" asks Dicko rhetorically, explaining that in the desert, there is no third-party intercession between a Tuareg Muslim and his God, no Imam to instruct or interpret the individual's belief.
Back in Kidal, we are taken to meet the rebels' representatives, who helped negotiate the June peace accord.
They outline their grievances, many of which are blindingly apparent to any visitor.
The general deprivation here is on a scale unimaginable, with few reliable utilities, streets strewn with rubbish and little or no effective hygiene. Over the 673,300 square kilo metres of the Kidal region, there is not one single metre of proper road.
And as I learn from a French doctor, there is no hospital for 480 kilometres in any direction - indeed, the sole medical provision for this vast area, he claims, is one young nurse, who works with her baby on her back.
Small wonder, then, that the rebellion continues, with spurts of violence on both sides.
Ibrahim won't be swapping his guitar for the gun again, however.
These days, his aim is closer to home than the government in Bamako, focusing as much on the shortcomings of Tuareg society as on their state-inflicted oppression.
"When we were young, we wanted to create new Tuareg society, devoid of the archaic feudal hierarchies," he explains.
"We wanted to establish a meritocracy, so that jobs and positions would be decided by talent rather than birth.
"We want to educate the population, some thing the old chiefs had always been against, so that people can live in the modern world and be effective on an international scale, and end our isolation. *
"In Tuareg society, it is the poet's role to tell the truth, even if it makes people uncomfortable."
03/03/07
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