From Kandia Crazy Horse: Please heed this week’s guest columnist, Kenyan NYU scholar Tavia Nyong’o. As a former resident of Mali and lifelong admirer of the Imazighen people, I felt a Son of Africa should illuminate their plight and that of their greatest rock band, Tinariwen (translation: “the deserts”).
When the Kel Tamashek (Tuareg) band Tinariwen left the sands of Mali for their first US tour this past spring, they stopped by to see their friends in the Diné (Navajo) Nation. “It was their first time in our desert,” says Jeneda Benally of the alter-native rock band Blackfire, which has traveled to Mali several times. “‘Desert to desert’ is an idea [we had] spoken about for years,” Benally said. And it finally came to pass, with Tinariwen members as honored guests at a pow-wow. The “incredible connection” between the groups Benally speaks of runs strong, despite an apparent dissimilarity in sound (think Joey Ramone versus Ali Farka Touré). Both bands play what Afropop.org critic Banning Eyre calls “extensions of the complex network of genres that stem from the blues.”
No wonder then that Tinariwen, rebel Amazigh musicians of North Africa, have attracted fans like Robert Plant, who played with them at the Festival of the Desert in 2003. Lionel Brouet’s festival doc and the band’s recent fine CD, Amassakoul, brought Tinariwen an international success that seemed to herald a more promising future for their homeland. Recent events, however, challenge that optimism.
An uneasy peace that had prevailed since the symbolic burning of arms in 1996 was ruffled on May 23rd when Tamashek militants temporarily captured several army outposts near Tinariwen’s Malian homebase, Kidal. The militants quickly retreated after seizing weapons and ammunition, and issued a widely circulated call for a referendum within Mali to address the specific economic, educational and ecological situation of the nomadic Tamashek people. The president of Mali quickly traveled to Libya, the launching ground for the 1980s Tamashek resistance, to obtain assurances from its leader Muammar al-Gadafi. Gadafi distanced himself from the militants and also announced the closing of a Libyan consulate in Kidal that had opened in January, and which had been a bone of contention between Libya and its regional rival Algeria.
While politicians maneuvered, civilians fled into the desert at one of the hottest times of the year. As of this writing, the United Nations has resumed food distribution in the region, but there is still concern for the safety of civilians, including nomads, in the desert. As the Malian army settles in and shops in Kidal reopen, the long-term crisis that prompted the rebellion has not been resolved, and the political will to solve it is apparently lacking.
Why all the fuss about the poorest region in one of the poorest countries in the world? The Imazighen have a long history in the Sahara, predating Islam, and have a rich culture symbolized in the blue turbans worn by Tamashek men. Since the colonial era, they have been a stateless people (not unlike the Kurds in the Middle East), and their nomadic way of life is spread across modern-day Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Algeria and Libya. In none of these countries — the militants feel — are their priorities adequately represented.
Until the advent of Tinariwen, there was no Tamashek-language media of any kind in Mali. As drought and poverty drove many young Tamashek into urban centers like Mali’s capital Bamako, a new class of ishumar (from the French chomeur, meaning a jobless person) was formed, and a new musical sound developed to match their plight: tishoumaren. Tinariwen is the most famous exponent of tishoumaren. Since first organizing in rebel camps in Libya in the early 1990s, trading in guns for electric guitars, they have traveled the Sahel with cassette tapes performing concerts, spreading a cultural message. Blending traditional melodic motifs with a rootsy, trance-like guitar sound, Tinariwen has created a modern music and contemporary message that now embraces rap in its ongoing attempt to represent a people who have successfully weathered chaos.
Underlying the current maneuvering in the desert are unspoken politics of resource extraction, not only the potential oil reserves that have been reported in the region, but also a persistent water crisis that, perhaps more than any other factor, now threatens a way of life that has been in ecological balance for millennia. When Algeria closes its borders with Mali, or the Malian government posts soldiers at desert wells, they directly threaten the precarious network upon which the Tamashek depend. US military presence in the region, and unfounded speculation linking the militants to Salafist extremists to the North, heighten the stakes and increase the risk that their plight will be misunderstood.
In the meantime, Tinariwen (currently touring Europe) continue to spread what their manager Andy Morgan calls “messages of encouragement and survival” on the wider stage that their recordings have afforded them. “When there is an injustice happening in one part of the world it affects us all,” Blackfire’s Benally reminds us. “We all have one root.”
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2006.
