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Q Magazine, Feature >>
Enter Sandmen
By WILLIAM SHAW
You may see many bands this summer, but none will have a story as remarkable as that of Tinariwen. Q journeys deep into the Sahara to meet the blues band formed in a refugee camp.
Rock prides itself on being rebel music. From the snotty, intergenerational warfare sparked by The Rolling Stones or the Sex Pistols, to the snarling agitprop of MC5 or The Clash, it likes to imagine itself as something that walks the walk, that fights the fight.
In reality, most rock stars wouldn't last five minutes outside the hotel room. But if there is one group that distils the idea of rock's enduring potential for rebellion, it is, astonishingly enough, a nomadic collective from the sun-scorched southern Sahara. Tinariwen are a group who used music to fight for their right to party - even to just exist - in a way no Western European rock band ever has. Theirs is a complex, brutal story but one that reaffirms a belief in the transformational power of rock music.
To get some idea of the isolated landscape from which Tinariwen have emerged, you have to travel there. Hassan - or Alhassane Ag Touhami, aka "Abin Abin" - picks us up from Mali's Mopti airport. He's one of the group's songwriters and guitarists, a dignified-looking man with a greying moustache whose demeanour offers no hint of his more rebellious youth. Dressed from head to foot in indigo robes and "shesh", or turban, he is every inch a Tuareg - the nomadic people who inhabit this part of the Sahara.
Indigo dye (the same vegetable dye that originally made jeans blue) stains his hands, face and moustache blue. It's a curious look, and not yet available in Boots, but indigo provides excellent protection from the sun. The indigo-clad Tuaregs are known as the "blue men of the desert".
From Mopti, a bone-crunching journey in a Toyota Land Cruiser will take us several hundred miles beyond Timbuktu, that city on the ancient caravan route that became a metaphor for the last word in remoteness. We have already driven for a day and a half, sleeping under the stars, when Hassan breaks into a smile. "Fini, le goudron," he announces happily. The tarmac is finished. (Mali was a French colony, and French remains the country's common tongue.) The wilderness begins. Daytime temperatures here can pass 40ºC at this time of year. On these often-hard-to-discern tracks through the scrub, you're lucky if you see five vehicles coming in the opposite direction all day.
At the tail end of the '90s, members of a French world music band called Lo'Jo heard tales of a legendary rock group who's been part of the Tuareg revolt of 1990. Their cassettes, though often poor quality and heavily duplicated, were popular locally. It was electrifying, raw music with a bluesy timelessness. They were called Tinariwen.
After tracking down some members, they helped Tinariwen organise the first ever Festival au Desert in 2001. This annual Malian world music event first brought Tinariwen to a wider audience.
Today, they have three albums behind them of plangent, modal, question-and-answer chants, punctuated by bursts of gritty guitar, from 2002's The Radio Tisdas Sessions, through 2004's Amassakoul ("Traveller") to last year's Aman Iman ("Water Is Life"). Despite the fact their songs are sung mostly in Tamasheq, a language spoken only by a couple of million people, they have built a substantial worldwide audience. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, aka "Abaraybone", nominally the group's leader in the same kind of loose way that RZA acts as the Wu-Tang Clan's lynchpin, puzzles over what their European and American fans understand of their music, but when they tell him, "Ça me touche" - It moves me - he has to take what they say at face value.
And they have serious fans. Robert Plant describes Tinariwen's music as "dropping a bucket into a deep well". Carlos Santana invited them to jam with him, dubbing them "the originators". Recently Coldplay told Q that Brian Eno had been playing Tinariwen tracks to the band to inspire them during the recording of their new album.
Plant and Santana's view is that Tinariwen are a direct link back to the origins of the blues. The slaves who made it to America whose descendants created the blues weren't desert-living Tuaregs, but from West Africa's coastal regions, so the idea of Tinariwen as the missing blues link may be fanciful, though as Tinariwen's English manager Andy Morgan points out, the conservatism of Tuareg society means that the roots of Tinariwen's music are indeed ancient (a remarkable Bristolian, Morgan loves Tinariwen's music and the desert in which they live with a passion, donning a Tuareg shesh the moment he steps onto Malian soil).
But there's another reason why their songs connect so profoundly, even when you can't fathom the words. At their core is a deep sadness. Some of it's due to the harshness of desert life. Some of it's nostalgia for a vanishing way of life. Some of it's born of more recent, more tangible tragedy.
The village where we sleep that second night, again under the stars, hasn't seen rain for eight months. The desert is growing, relentlessly. On the afternoon of the third day we make it to Tassalit, Tinariwen's HQ. It's a remote oasis, a collection of uniformly brown mud-walled houses scattered around a dry river bed. There we meet more members of the drifting collective, including the lanky, placid, guru-like figure of Ibrahim.
Ibrahim writes most of the songs. There's one on Aman Iman called Soixante Trois. He wrote it in the '80s, but it's about 1963, the year catastrophe befell Mali's Tuaregs.
A brief history comes in useful here. When Mali became independent in 1960, power was concentrated in the capital, Bamako; ethnically, the new rulers were Bambara-speaking people. While the French had treated all their subjects with equal contempt, now power lay with the darker-skinned Bambara majority who largely regarded the nomadic Tuaregs, who inhabited the Saharan fringes, as hicks who required civilising. When after three years of such treatment, the Tuaregs rose up in spontaneous rebellion in 1963, the Malian army responded with terrifying brutality. "J'étais trois ans," Ibrahim recalls, "je ne me rapelle pas tous; je me rapelle les massacres..." I was three. I don't remember everything; I remember the massacres...
To interview Ibrahim it's best to wait until the heat of the day is gone. At sunset he'll take you out to a favourite spot in the desert, a dry oued - a river bed - where the sand is soft, or an outcrop of rocks, and he'll light a fire. One of his friends will start making tea Tuareg-style, strong, thick and sweet. When he's relaxed he'll start to talk.
Some memories still burn, like the day he heard villagers clapping and wondered what celebration he was missing. It turned out that the Malian army were executing two women and a man, forcing the villagers to applaud each time they killed another.
One day they came for his father. A few days later, his grandmother took him to see the family flacks of goats and horses, lying dad on the ground, having been slaughtered by the army. That was the day he learned his father was dead. "Ils ont tiré mon pere." They shot my father.
To lose a father was awful, but for a Tuareg to lose his flock is calamitous. A herd is your life and your status. The Tuaregs' whole existence is bound up with the animals they own. The young Ibrahim fled on foot with his grandmother to Algeria.
In the years leading to 1974, the situation became even worse with "la sécheresse" - the drought - that forced thousands more Tuaregs into refugee camps and towns.
It's a characteristic of this generation - they were Tuaregs unable to live the Tuareg way of life. They are at once part of the tradition, but outside it. Ibrahim, who missed out on being raised among animals, feels that particularly. In some ways he remains an outsider to this day, not wearing the shesh that all the other men in the group wear. "Oui," he says. "C'est ca." That's right.
Moving around Algeria and Libya in search of work, Ibrahim joined other young Tuareg boys, rootless, removed from their traditional way of life. And that's when they first heard the revolutionary noise of the electric guitar.
Driving back from one evening's camp fire, Ibrahim puts on the CD player in his Toyota Land Cruiser. Free At Last by Free blares out. It sounds incongruous here in the desert, and yet curiously right... as it must have done to Ibrahim and his friends when they first picked up on Western rock music. To young boys raised in such a conservative, isolated culture, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin must have sounded extraordinary.
The guitar is not a traditional Tuareg instrument. Ibrahim remember seeing his first one in a Western movie. For a while, before he could afford the real thing, he'd make his own from a stick and an oil can. Hassan, Ibrahim and another friend Inteyeden used to make up songs. When a local band was asked to find some Tuareg musicians for a concert in Algeria, they offered Kel Tinariwen ("The People Of The Desert"), as they were becoming known, their first big gig; and, for the first time ever, an electric guitar of their own.
Ibrahim was thrilled. He had no idea of what an electric guitar would be like. "Je l'ai aimé bien." I liked it a lot. He smiles in the darkness.
In Tuareg music, instruments have meaning. The Tuareg flute is an instrument you play to comfort an aching heart. So what part would the electric guitar play? Ibrahim answers straight away. "C'est pour créer un solution." It is to make an answer.
Cut off from their traditional way of life, Ibrahim and his musician friends were part of a generation known popularly as the ishumar. The word is a corruption of chomeur, the French word for an unemployed person. Despised by Algerian police, ostracised by older Tuaregs, they were outcasts, finding work where they could. For the ishumar, their outcast status gradually became a badge of honour.
Traditional Tuareg clan life had failed them. Looking for a new identity, Tinariwen found it in electric guitars, in the songs they were making up; songs often criticising the old-fashionged, divisive ways of the old Tuareg clans. People in the West are used to rock'n'roll tales of redemption, of lonely Minnesota teenagers who find themselves through music; it is no surprise, then, when a generation of Tuaregs find themselves through rock music in North Africa. Tinariwen became a sub-Saharan version of The Pogues, taking a traditional form, and squeezing something new from it.
The music they made drips with the hurt of that refugee generation. You can hear it in songs such as Ibrahim's Assouf, from Aman Iman, written during that time, an exile's song of pain as pure as any Delta blues: "What can I do with this eternal longing/Which inhabits my heart..."
In the '80s, the Tuareg rebel movement started to gain momentum. Ibrahim and his fellow musicians joined the older Tuaregs in clandestine meetings, plotting revenge for 1963. Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi spotted an opportunity to co-opt this generation to aid his masterplan for North African domination. He put out a ringing call for all Tuaregs to attend military training in his camps. Many of the displaced generation of ishumar headed to the Libyan training camps. "C'était automatique. On ne refuse pas," insists Ibrahim. It was automatic. Nobody refused. Cynical or not, Gaddafi's cry represented the first real opportunity for justice for the ishumar. Three thousand volunteers materialised.
Training conditions were brutal. But by the late '80s, as well as developing into trained fighters, Tinariwen were becoming the house band for the rebellion, with songs such as Hassan's blood-curdling Tamatant Tilay acting as martial anthems: "Death is here, she is counting the days/When she arrives there will be no more remedies."
In 1990, under cover of darkness, Ibrahim snaeked back to Tessalit with several of his friends. The Malian army were expecting the rebellion to start at any time. Everyone was under suspcion.
That night, Ibrahim sought out his old family house, the place he had left 26 years earlier. For a few weeks he lived clandestinely. The day that two of his comrades were arrested and later killed by the authorities, Ibrahim knew he had to leave and headed into the mountains. Within weeks the rebellion had started.
From their headquarters in the hills, he and fellow members of Tinariwen rode into battle, quite literally with a guitar in one hand and le Kalash - a Kalashnikov AK-47 - in the other. The image sounds like something from a movie. "Oui," agrees Ibrahim quietly. "Comme un film."
Ibrahim had taken to the rebelliousness of rock music. But in other ways he's unlike a conventional rock star. Like other Tuaregs he finds it extremely hard to talk about his personal experiences.
As him about the rebellion of 1990 and he can talk generally about the battles he was in. But ask him for details about the friends he lost, and the answers are always vague. "Oui, j'ai perdu des amis." Yes, I lost friends. When? "Tout le monde a perdu des amis." Everybody lost friends.
What he remembers most, and to a Tuareg this is every bit as shocking as the human deaths, were the animals. To attempt to starve out the rebels, the Malian army killed all the livestock they came across and left them rotting in the desert. "Ce n'était pas les gens. Ça m'a touché pas beaucoup. C'était la guerre. Je savais que des gens mourraient. C'était las animaux." It wasn't the people. That didn't bother me much. It was war. I knew people would die. It was the animals, he says.
Throughout the '90s, hostilities continued, with bouts of concessions being made by the Malian government; sometimes sincere, sometimes reneged upon.. Over the years an uneasy accommodation has been reached, punctuated by bouts of fighting.
One morning, before we leave, sudden violence erupts 200km away on the road to Tin-Zawantine - which, in desert terms, is the next village. All day we hear from sources close to the fighting about a major ambush that is being carried out on a government convoy. When the shooting stops, at least eight soldiers are dead, and many more wounded or taken hostage. Driving back to Mopti, our driver, who remembers how ethnic tension often follows such assaults, is nervous of entering Gao, where in 1990 in an orgy of violence, one-time Tinariwen guitarist Kheddou had a car rolled onto his legs and was doused in petrol before excaping.
In Tessalit, though, Ibrahim and Hassan are enjoying the fruits of peace. They are now the grand old men of Tinariwen. A younger generation has joined them, too. Tinariwen always has been a fluid collective rather than a band with a fixed membership.
Ibrahim sees rock tours as a kind of nomadism. It's something they understand. The main item on Tinariwen's rider is a cylinder for their gas stove so they can brew Tuareg tea backstage. He loves visiting parts of the world to which he'd never expected to travel, but after weeks on the road he hates being enclosed all the time.
Ibrahim misses the desert. "On a toujours des chaises," he says, quietly. There are always chairs. He prefers sitting cross-legged, here in the desert.
In the battle-cry song Tamatant Tilay, Hassan had sung that Tuaregs would return home. "We'll dig wells and cultivate gardens," he'd announced in a song he wrote in 1983. Now both in their late 40s, Ibrahim and Hassan are doing exactly that.
Men who barely believed the promises they made to themselves in rock songs they wrote 20 years ago and more, songs that formed a soundtrack to the Tuareg rebellion of 1990, have come home.
In the baking afternoon sun, Ibrahim, 15 feet underground at the base of his newly dug well, starts a petrol pump and we watch as a miraculous jet of clear water spurts out to refresh the new acacia saplings he has just planted, trees growing in desert soil that will shade the house he hasn't yet built.
Postscript: Tension in eastern Mali has continued to increase. A week after Q left Tinariwen, the group were to set out on a European tour. Travelling to the airport their two 4x4s were contronted by a Malian army helicopter that buzzed them, forcing them to turn back. At the time of going to press the group were still trying to find a safe way to leave the country.
Tinariwen tour the UK from 14 May.
See www.tinariwen.com for details.
- - -
Desert Storm
A Rough Guide to Tinariwen
The Radio Tisdas Sessions
(Universal, 2002)
Recorded in a Malian radio station, with Robert Plant associate Justin Adams co-producing, this was the first time the band's parched desert blues was available in Europe. Adams had to work fast: sessions were evening-only, thanks to an electricity shortage.
Amassakoul
(IRL, 2004)
Tinariwen's trademark sound begins to take shape. At first, the slow, rolling rhythm guitar, handclaps and call-and-response vocals seem incredibly casual. Then they suddenly interlock and the sparks fly.
Aman Iman
(Independiente, 2007)
The album that pushed the band beyond mere "world music", their rebel stance infused with an almost romantic pride in their origins: Assouf is about the longing specific to life in their desert. The blues, it seems, is universal. 05/01/08 >> go there
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