A Starbucks in Emeryville might seem like an odd place to feel the hot, dry wind of the Sahara.  But watching a video of Tuareg women swaying while seated in a semi-circle, pounding out a loping dance rhythm with mortar and pestle tinde percussion as a veiled and turbaned man executes a series of agile break-dance-like moves from a squatting position, the desert breeze was almost palpable.
     The video came courtesy of Mali-born Issa Mohamed, director of the Timbuktu Heritage Institute.  He filmed the celebration on a recent trip back to his hometown, and sent it to illustrate the kind of celebration that will be taking place on stages around the Bay Area next week, when the group Ensemble Tartit arrives as part of a U.S. tour undertaken to raise awareness of Tuareg culture.  
     Hailing from the same region in northern Mali as Mohamed, the five women and four men who make up the ensemble perform dances, chants and songs embodying a desert lifestyle that has survived for millennia in the unforgiving Sahara.  
     “You really have the feeling you’re sitting around a Tuareg encampment,” says Alison Loerke, the tour’s manager.  “It’s not just the music, but the subtle hand an eye movements, which are so evocative.”
     Ensemble Tartit makes its West Coast debut on Tuesday as part of UC Santa Cruz’s Global African Music and Arts Festival/Symposium.  On Wednesday, the group joins with Mohamed for a workshop on Tuareg culture at Ashkenaz in Berkeley, in a benefit for the Timbuktu Heritage Institute, offering a demonstration of Tuareg music and dance.  
     For untold centuries, the Tuareg were rulers of the Sahara, nomads who traversed the vast desert expanse forging long-lasting cultural and economic links between west and north Africa. While the great empires of Mali arose in the 11^th and 12^th centuries, the Tuareg – or Kel Tamashek, as they call themselves – helped make Timbuktu a thriving university town, where some of the world’s most advanced scholars wrote treatises on mathematics, physics, medicine and Sufi-inspired Islamic spirituality.  
     Related to North Africa’s indigenous Amazigh (or Berber) peoples, The Tuareg resisted French colonialism into the late 19^th century, earning the a reputation as fierce and wily desert warriors.  With the end of French colonial rule in the 1960’s Tuareg society found itself divided by the borders of five new countries: Algeria, Libya, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta).
     “Most people say it’s a loose confederation of people speaking a similar language and somewhat similar cultural practices,” says Thomas K. Seligman, who has worked with the Tuareg community in Niger for 30 years.  “What’s interesting to me is the Tuareg are liminal people who exist in transition between people typed as Berber, Mediterranean and African.  They are part of both, or neither, or all of the above.”
     A devastating drought in the 1970’s and 80’s almost wiped out the Tuareg way of life, killing off camels and goats and forcing most Tuareg to settle in cities.  A rebellion against Mali’s military government in the early 90’s dispersed the Tuareg further, leaving many exiled in refugee camps in Mauritania, Algeria and Burkina Faso.  Fadimata Walett Oumar, Ensemble Tartit’s founder, was working with the United Nations in a Burkina Faso refugee camp when she assembled the group for a music festival in Belgium in 1995. 
     “I think to myself as an ambassador of Tuareg culture,” says Oumar in French, with Loerke serving as translator.  “I love to sing and I love to dance.  It’s a normal, everyday breathing thing we do.”
     A peace accord in 1996 allowed many Tuareg men to join the Malian army, leaving many women to fend for themselves.  Ensemble Tartit has helped raise funds to support education and micro-enterprises.  The group recorded a gorgeous CD, “Ichichila” (Network), that features both traditional songs and new pieces addressing the Tuareg present-day situation.  
     Ensemble Tartit has performed across Europe with a startlingly beautiful sound unlike better-known Malian groups.
     “It’s a sound that’s really a result of the exodus that the Tuareg has experienced,” Mohamed says.
     “When you listen to these songs, it makes you want to go back to the Sahara to the Tuareg life.  The music is a way of preserving what makes us Tuareg.”