By PHIL DREW Entertainment518@|21st-centurymedia.com

TROY — The West African nation of Mali is scarcely on America’s cultural radar. That’s a shame.

This nation — independent since 1960 — sits astride what was once one of the most important trade routes in the world, and its largest city Timbuktu (apart from its capital, Bamako) became synonymous with exotic riches, an economic and cultural intersection

“It’s a crossroads of cultures, and it’s always been a crossroads of cultures, like New York City, only 600 years ago,” said Columbia County resident Christopher Nolan. Nolan serves as a kind of road manager for the Caravan for Peace, featuring a pair of musical acts on tour in the Northeast. He’s a musical ambassador and an advocate on behalf of an important international festival driven into exile by upheaval in its native land.

Local audiences will get a taste of the riches of Malian culture Friday as the Caravan for Peace visits Freedom Square, the outdoor performing venue in north Troy. The event is sponsored by the nearby Sanctuary for Independent Media.

The Caravan has camped out at Nolan’s home near Germantown for several weeks while running out to music festivals like Montreal’s Festival Nuit d’Afrique and performing in places like Washington, D.C., and at Northampton’s Iron Horse Café.

One of the featured acts is a mixed male-female vocal ensemble of seven known by a pair of names, Tartit/Imharhan, reflecting the joining together of two distinct musical traditions of the desert-dwelling Tuareg peoples.

They are accompanied by traditional stringed and percussive instruments — the pehardent, a multi-stringed instrument; tinde, traditional hand percussion; and the imzad, single-stringed and played with a bow, like a violin.

The music is enhanced by modern electric guitars played in a traditionalist style. It creates a sound Nolan likens to the electronic experimental music of Steve Reich — “hypnotic, almost trancelike,” he said. “It’s deeply steeped in the musical traditions of the area, but the electric component grows out of it.”

The other featured act is a quartet led by Mamadou Kelly, who, along with two of his colleagues, were once desert-blues backup musicians to Touré.

“Mamadou is a virtuoso who plays acoustic guitar with a fingerpicking style, backed by an electric bass,” Nolan said. Mamadou is also backed by traditional instruments like the calabash, a sort of half-gourd used for percussion, and the monochord, “sort of pre-banjo,” Nolan said. “They sing really tight, well-constructed blues and dance music, very accessible to the western ear.”

Nolan, an architect and real-estate developer, came to appreciate Le Festival au Désert as “a locally-generated economic development project not supported by NGOs or outside charities, local people supporting themselves.”

He holds out hope that a restoration of order in the region, perhaps girded by elections this month, may help bring the festival back from exile to its original home in the north of Mali. Order is fragile in a nation, like many in Africa, where borders bear no relation to traditional territories and cultures. Tuareg guerrillas recently freed election officials taken hostage earlier this spring.

“The multi-ethnic groups traveling with us, they’re getting along, and they’ve been living together for centuries,” Nolan said. “The problem is not ethnicity, it’s political. We don’t think this Caravan will assist in re-establishing the Festival, but we think everything will-re-establish itself, and we’re hoping to raise awareness of what’s going on there. Whatever happens when it re-establishes, perhaps as early as 2014, we’re hoping to come home.”

Caravan for Peace

Where: Freedom Square, 39 5th Ave., N. Troy; rain location The Sanctuary for Independent Media, 3361 6th Ave.

When: 5:30 p.m. Friday

Admission: Free; www.mediasanctuary.org or call (518) 272-2390.