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FESTIVAL IN THE DESERTMusic, Sand and KalashnikovsAndy Morgan |
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Début janvier, avec les musiciens touaregs de Tinariwen, les Angevins de Lo'Jo ont organisé un festival au Mali, en plein cur du Sahara. Andy Morgan, patron du label anglais Apartment 22 (U-cef, Side Stepper) a eu la chance d'être du voyage. Il en est revenu avec des souvenirs "à 24 carats" qu'il nous fait partager dans un beau texte riche en scènes et personnages étonnants Car si, en effet, organiser un tel festival dans le désert ressemble à un parcours du combattant, c'en est un autre pour des rebelles touaregs (pour certains formés à la guerilla dans les camps de Khadafi) que de tomber la kalashnikov pour combattre avec d'autres armes : la musique et la médiatisation de leur cause. |
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I first heard about the Festival in the Desert from Philippe Brix, the lean and indefatigable manager of the French global troubadours, LoJo. Two years ago, on his return from one of LoJos regular trips to Bamako, the capital of Mali, Philippe told me that the group had minted a solid and friendly relationship with a band of Touareg musicians from northern Mali called Tinariwen, which means deserts or empty places in Tamashek, the ancient language of the Touareg people. Philippe had also met a quietly spoken and well-informed Touareg intellectual called Issa Dicko. Dicko was a member of Efes, an official association based in Mali whose goal is to further the political, social and cultural development of Malis remote northern desert regions. After many conversations and cups of bitter syrupy tea they decided to stage a festival of Touareg music and culture in the desert around the first full moon of the new millennium. Almost a year of ifs,
buts, dont knows and maybes followed. Then in May 2000 a beautiful slim
white book called Tamashek published in France by Editions Deleatur came
through the letter box. It was an account written by Philippe Brix of
a trip to Mali to prepare the ground for the festival. He had completed
a 3000 mile round-trip by Toyota land cruiser from Bamako, to Kidal in
western Mali via Timbuktu and then back again via Gao. He had met the
top brass of Efes, and various other potential partners in the venture
to discuss how the huge logistical problems of staging this event would
be handled, and by whom, and at what cost. Mohammed Ba, President of Efes
and deputy for the Kidal region in Malis chamber of representatives, had
announced that the festival would take place on an empty plain of sand
near the ancient ruins of Tamaradant in the Adrar des Ifoghas. The location
gave the word remote an entirely new meaning. Philippe had joined forces
with the organisers of a famous annual street theatre festival in Chalon-sur-Soane,
central France and with the Association YO!, a bunch of veteran rave promoters
in western France who knew all about the technicalities of staging musical
events in unusual circumstances. The finance would come from LoJo themselves,
the French Cultural Center in Bamako, The French Embassy, Credit Agricole
and various French cultural quangos like ADAMI and AFAA. There were also
plans to spend a whole month in the Kidal region in the run up to the
festival and record Tinariwen and other Touareg musicians. Justin Adams,
the English guitarist and producer of LoJos two highly acclaimed albums
Mojo Radio (1998) and Bohème de Cristal (2000), would be drafted
in to help with the recordings. LoJo like thinking
big. Maybe thats why they scare the mainstream French music industry,
although it must be said that their distributor Universal did agree to
contribute towards some of the costs of filming the event. The green light
finally came in October 2000. Point Afrique, a French travel agency specialising
in desert tourism, run a regular weekly charter from Paris to Gao in eastern
Mali and they were responsible for transporting musicians, technicians,
equipment and plain old festival ravers like myself to Mali. On January
7th at the ungodly hour of 2am, I boarded their chartered troop carrier
with 100 or so other virgin travellers and Nigel Williamson, an English
journalist who pens music articles for The Times, Billboard and Uncut
amongst others. The only thing that spiked my excitement was a gnawing apprehension about the general anarchy in the region north of Gao. Touareg politics is like a labyrinth made of mud. We had all been told that the Touareg rebels had signed a peace accord with the Malian government in 1997 and everything was now bathed in sweetness and light. Peace in our time. Young Touareg men who had lived for years in the bush on dates, camels milk, rebel philosophy and the dream of self-determination were happily rebuilding their lives as soldiers in the Malian army or teachers, administrators, politicians, even musicians. Tired of war, they had accepted peaceful cooperation and development as the only feasible option. Reports from the field weren't so rosy. Many of the rebels, either for noble ideological or purely practical reasons, had not accepted the terms of the peace accord and were refusing to hand in their weapons as requested by the Touareg leadership. As far as they were concerned the black Bambara politicians in Bamako were still treating them like a sub-species, ignoring their language and culture, starving the Saharan regions of aide and development, embezzling funds promised by international NGOs and generally acting like they just didnt care. The cultural fault line that separates the white Berber Touaregs of the Sahara from their black sub-Saharan neighbours, the Songhai, the Bambara, Peul, Manding, Dogon etc, has groaned with underlying tension for centuries and that tension was still there, however sugar coated. The murderous chaos of modern Algeria together with the internal politics of Niger and Ghadaffis wayward policies in Libya didnt help either. The whole region was
playing Russian roulette. Only a few months before Philippe Brix made
his reconnaissance trip in March, three Dutch tourists were kidnapped
and murdered, their throats slit and bodies burned on the road to Kidal.
Only a week before the festival an army checkpoint on the main Gao-Kidal
road was attacked by bandits and several servicemen were taken as hostages.
Whether the perpetrators of these crimes were just opportunist muggers
or uncompromising rebels fighting for their dream by any means necessary
I just dont know. It was said that the killers of the Dutchmen were lead
by a renegade Algerian, possibly an ex soldier or GIA terrorist or both,
and his gang possessed the latest vehicles and guns. Thats the deadly
fascination of the desert. Outlaws, soldiers, freedom fighters and politicians
play a game of cat and mouse in the vast and arid emptiness. European
political rules dont apply. Its closer to the wild west. A week is by
no means time enough to equip you with the insight and knowledge of local
power-struggles to be able to tell the difference between Dillinger and
Che Guevara in these parts. Gao airport consisted
of a huge plain of sun-cracked tarmac and an adobe aircraft hanger. Inside
it was all screams and chaos but the human flow somehow carried us safely
past customs and immigrations. Nigel and I ended up in a group of 16 festival
goers, all French apart from ourselves, under the wing of a local travel
agency called Azawad Voyages who had hired four 4x4 Land Cruisers to get
us to the festival site. Our vehicle was driven by an imperturbable Songhai
from Gao called Youba. I found out that I had been mispronouncing Songhai
for years and it actually should sound something like shongoi. Mahmoud
Ben Ali, the young, ambitious and eager patron of Azawad Voyages also
rode in our vehicle along with Nigel, two French blokes called Thomas
and Olivier, and myself. Thomas was a loud brash jester with a talent
for making people laugh and Olivier, by contrast, a quiet and respectful
Parisian. Due to the enforced underdevelopment, which the powers that
be far away in Bamako have allowed to grip this part of Mali for decades,
according to Mahmouds cursing observations, the road out of Gao was nothing
more than a track, deeply rutted and treacherously sandy. The drive to
Kidal consisted of eight hours worth of bumps, jolts and searing sandblasted
heat. Youba held the road like a veteran, clocking up impressive speeds
on the open stretches of hard desert plain. He was proud of the fact that
he had never once capsized a vehicle. Along the way we passed two villages,
each with their obligatory police / army checkpoints at which our convoy
halted respectfully while Mahmoud kept the grim-faced fatigued officials
sweet. These hamlets were nothing more than a sparse collection of one-story
adobe yards baking in the aridity of the midday desert. They looked like
Gods own gulags. My overriding thought was simply, how do people sustain
life in places like this?!! Kidal is the local
administrative centre of the northeastern corner of Mali. In amongst its
decomposing French colonial fort, its airstrip, market, brace of hotels
and restaurants you can find most of lifes necessities, as long as you
can distinguish what is strictly necessary from what is grossly western
and superfluous. After a day out on the desert trail a cold beer is the
mother of all necessities and Nigel and I make for Bar Matthieu as soon
as humanly possible. Nigels appetite for cold beer, almost to the exclusion
of any other kind of sustenance provoked great gallic laughs and good
humor amongst our fellow-travellers and cemented his reputation as l'excentrique
Anglais, an impression reinforced by Nigels sparse and yet original grasp
of the French language. English tourists are rare in these parts. Mahmoud
delighted in telling us that even the Touaregs mourned Ladi Di. We spent
our first night in Africa on the roof of a house on the edge of Kidal
just by the airstrip. The moon was but a slither away from fullness and
it flooded the night with brightness, making the stars hardly visible.
The famous cold of
the desert night in winter only really bites in the wee hours of the morning,
at which time anyone not in possession of a reinforced five-season sleeping
bag will find his testicles shrunken to the size of nutmegs. Its friggin
freezing, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, the rising sun warms you as
quick as an electric heater. Breakfast was baguette, surprisingly crunchy
and tasty in these part, and Vache Qui Rit. Processed cheese and tinned
sardines, along with the occasional treat like goats meat with macaroni,
figured a great deal in our menus over the next few days. After a trip
to town to buy cheches, the famous Touareg headgear without which life
in the desert is tricky if not unbearable, we left the town in convoy
by the eastern track to Tin Essako. Just before leaving we were treated
to a titillating display of brute Ramboesque power as a convoy of about
25 Toyota Land Cruisers carrying the Prime Minister of Mali, four foreign
ambassadors (France, USA, Canada and Germany), with entourage and bodyguards
drove out of Kidal on their way to the Festival. I suddenly felt like
Mel Gibson in the film Year Of Living Dangerously. At least two of the
vehicles were upholstered with the biggest, deadliest mounted machine
guns I had ever seen in my life. Another three of the Land Cruisers were
brimful of gun-toting young blades, heads wrapped in their cheches, and
eyes masked by fake Armani shades. They looked like Kurdish rebels I once
saw in a newspaper article. The convoy snaked its way through dust clouds
and out of town, exuding a potent mixture of guerrilla chic and badly
disguised paranoia. This official junket could be compared in its brazen
sense of provocative diplomacy to a visit by Tony Blair to the republican
sanctuary of the Falls Road in Belfast. Our collective sense of awe and
excitement was ratcheted up a few notches. More dust, more juddering
tracks, more dessicated landscapes. As the convoy edged its way towards
the plain known as In-Amadjel, where the festival was happening, the scenery
became imperceptibly emptier, drier and eerier. I realised that what I
had been driving through the day before was not real desert, only the
amateur hour equivalent. There were still trees, however mangled and skeletal
and even shrubs, however brittle and parched. Now we were entering the
dead zone where even the merest hint of vegetation or habitation was absent.
This was the Teneré, the land of nothing, where wind and sun socialised
with sand and rocks, glaring suspiciously at outsiders. If the Americans
really had faked the moon landings, this is where they must have done
it. Our vehicle lurched
drunkenly over the brow of a low black hill and there it was
the
Festival in The Desert. At first it was hard to see in the midday haze.
The site consisted of a line of about 20 brown nomadic tents and a small
stage. It seemed laughably insignificant in midst of the huge flat plain
of earth bordered by dunes and hills, like a brown twig in the middle
of an immense empty parking lot. To the south, about fifteen minutes walk
from the site itself, there was an arid grove of gnarled and thorny trees
where we set up camp. Some had brought tents but most of us just slept
on mats under the stars. Nigel and I went over to the festival site as
soon as we could to meet our friends. In one of the large nomad tents
nearest the stage, about 30 Europeans had made their home and there we
found Justin and all of the LoJos as well as technicians, organisers,
hangers-on and friends. It was good to see Philippe, Denis, Richard, Kham,
Yamina and Nadja from LoJo and especially good to see Justin. I gave him
three bear hugs; one from his wife Mandy, one from his son Joseph and
one from me. Greetings were quickly followed by news. Apparently we had
just missed the arrival of the Prime Ministers convoy. About 20 camel
riders had come out to greet the grand stranger and Tinariwen, the desert
rebels, had insisted on playing a welcoming set on the stage with full
PA as the convoy drew up to the site. To pursue the Tony Blair in Falls
Road analogy, it was as if Blairs arrival had been greeted by a procession
of unarmed IRA volunteers and an impromptu concert by Christy Moore. There was more. The
truck carrying three tons of PA and lighting equipment from Gao to the
festival site had been ambushed in the dead of night by 11 bandits, two
of whom were armed with Kalashnikovs. By heavenly chance the PA convoy
was also carrying Kheddou, one of the guitarists with Tinariwen and a
hero of the Touareg rebellion. His body has been pierced a total of seventeen
times by bullets and as a consequence of which he now walks with a limp.
It was he who had led the attack by small group of Touaregs armed only
with swords and sticks on an army post near Kidal at the beginning of
the rebellion and captured the arms and ammunition which allowed the uprising
to take hold and develop. Kheddou is known and respected throughout the
Sahara. He negotiated with the bandits for more than two hours, asking
them where they intended to dispose of 3 tons of PA equipment in the middle
of the desert and what their families, who Kheddou knew, would have to
say about the matter. In the end he managed to persuade them to let the
convoy pass. Disaster had been avoided and not a single shot had been
fired. Justin told me about
the sessions in Kidal. Together with LoJos sound engineer, Jean-Paul Romain,
he had spent fifteen days recording Tinariwen and Azawad. Electricity
is switched on between 7pm and midnight each evening and so the pair had
this small daily window in which to record. It certainly concentrated
the mind. LoJo had performed a concert which was broadcast by the Tamashek
radio station in Kidal. Philippe told me more about the hardships involved
in making the festival a reality. The petty politics of Efes, and the
other Touareg association, Assakok, had proved to be both a smoke screen
and a stumbling block. Quite understandably, local knowledge of event
organisation was nil and a lot of time was spent patiently teaching the
ABC of staging a concert to the local promoters. When the band had arrived
at the site it was soon realised that a stage had to be built out of concrete
in the absence of scaffolding and wood. Philippe managed to borrow the
money from the mayor of Tin Essako, the nearest village, to build buy
the concrete. A mason was brought in from Bamako and everyone worked solidly
for several days to build a metre high platform. The same mason also built
a bread oven on the site, which kept everyone blissfully supplied with
fresh crusty breakfast baguettes. Even finding branches with which to
erect the large nomadic tents was a huge problem because branches of the
required length and straightness were like gold dust in these parts. The
arrival of the prime minister, who had been invited without consultation
by Mohammed Ba, the local MP and President of Efes, had complicated matters,
imposing a heavy military presence and the unforeseen straightjacket of
protocol on the event. I was introduced to the famous Ba, a huge man in
royal blue jellaba and mountainous white cheche. Size and authority are
closely related in Touareg society. He apologized for all the organisational
problems and assured me that things would be better once the Prime Minister
had gone the next day. Nevertheless, despite all these trials and tribulations,
I could see that Philippe felt like a hundred miles as he looked around
him and said with a huge smile, "We're here. We did it !" After dinner at our encampment, we headed back to the festival site for the official opening. The light of the deepening dusk was magical across the plain. The first full moon of the new millennium was already up in the eastern sky looking like a rising white sun. The Touaregs say that a full moon in the desert has the power to crack boulders in half and drive people mad. Near and far, the camel riders were out on their towering white thoroughbreds, piercing the horizon as if attempting to defy the awesome immensity of the sky. Out on the plain a group of women, heads covered with black shawls, were huddled around a Tindé drum. This simple long wooden framed drum loosely covered with goatskin is the emblematic instrument of traditional Touareg culture and Touareg musicians call their traditional music tindé to distinguish it from the more modern electric and rock influenced styles. Two women sit on either side of the drum padding out soft, mesmerising beats while their companions chant songs in a call and response style. The sound rises up
into the sheltering sky like a pulse of enchantment and is audible for
miles. We approached the group and stood by them while they played. There
were about six mounted camel-riders near the group, all dressed to kill
behind their impenetrable cheches. We didnt seem to be upsetting anyone
at first because there were other men standing with us and noone paid
us much heed. Then it was as if we werent welcomed anymore. The camel
riders who had been strolling at some distance from the group would come
towards us, cantering in time with the womens rhythm, and brush past us
close enough to make those huge gliding hooves seemed terrifying. In fact,
a rider in full ceremonial dress atop a thoroughbred racing camel is a
beautiful but not altogether comfortable mixture of grace and menace.
In general the Touaregs are friendly but reserved, impenetrable and a
little haughty. They only give you their eyes which leaves you guessing
a lot and prone to pangs of paranoia. There was nothing really aggressive
in their behaviour. It was a kind of menacing curiosity. Walking across
that plain left me wondering if I had stumbled into one of those huge
epic Victorian orientalist canvasses. Yet there was nothing really exotic
about what I was seeing. It was all too hard and tangible for that. The festival started
with speeches. The prime minister and his court were seated on sofas.
Everybody else, stood, knelt or sat on plastic chairs. There were about
50 to 60 Europeans and as many as ten times that number of local Touaregs.
The occasion was starched and formal. It was as if some arcane Machiavellian
game was being played out, with all the rules hidden from view. News that
army units were hidden in the hills all around us, there to protect the
dignitaries, gave the moment a particularly potent charge. We learned
later that one of the famous bandit warlords, Ibrahim Banga, had slipped
into the site incognito, face masked by his cheche, and listened to the
speeches whilst posing as a good and peace loving citizen of the Malian
republic. The speeches were all your honour, cooperation, friendship after
war and our welcome foreign guests delivered in French and then Tamashek.
Justin and the LoJos were having serious first night nerves. Deciding
on a running order had proven to be a task requiring very fine diplomatic
skills as each Touareg group vied for poll billing, keen for their group,
their region and their tribe to be seen in the best possible light. Justin
had landed the job of stage manager by default and he rose to the challenge
with defiant enthusiasm, attending tirelessly to the musicians technical
and political difficulties. Stagecraft, as it is known in the west, was
something new to the Touareg groups. The whole idea of taking the stage,
connecting with an audience, running through a predefined set of songs,
encores and the goodnight is unknown. To them a performance is just an
at home session transplanted onto a stage. The musicians chat amongst
themselves and with the audience, tuning up for hours, strolling across
the stage and generally taking things very easy. Nevertheless when a performance
was in flow, then there was no mistaking the passion or the skill. Who
needs stagecraft anyway? The opening act of
the festival, a traditional tindé group from Tessalit on the Algerian
border, took the stage in just such a fashion. The music spluttered hesitantly
into life but when once the engine was definitely turning over, the effect
was mesmerising. I remembered just how captivating the polyrythms of Malian
music can be.pure rhythm without definite beat. The air was cooling and
darkening all around us. Despite the best efforts of LoJos dedicated lighting
engineer, Jerôme Lubin who had moved heaven and earth to bring a
small but respectable rig across oceans and deserts, the light show was
surpassed by one far greater. The day before I had been joking with some
of my fellow travellers about how preposterous it would be if there were
to be an eclipse to celebrate the opening of the festival. The laugh was
on us. No sooner had the moon reached its fullness above the horizon,
its perfect rotundity was invaded by a dark shadow. We were in for a total
eclipse of the moon. For me, the whole event was already skirting the
limits of belief before the great Lighting Engineer in the Sky pulled
out this marvel for us. The eclipse seemed like the stuff of fantasy and
fairy-tales. We were in for a truly magical spectacle. When LoJo took the
stage they seemed nervous. A potent cocktail of fatigue, prolonged excitement
and first night nerves produced a jumpy set, which nonetheless seemed
to go down a storm with the Touaregs. They didnt exactly clap. Thats not
their style. With Tamashek audiences it seems to be all or nothing. Until
the moment of abandon comes, they will just look on in silent impenetrability,
which is very unnerving if youre not used to it. Then, if the music is
having the required effect, they will flip on a coin and start hollering,
shouting and stamping out their appreciation. This approach definitely
unnerved LoJo even further but they kept things steady and proceeded through
a set comprising several totally new numbers, which showed a great deal
of courage. The singing of Nadja and Yamina Nid el Mourid, the two sisters,
was especially highly appreciated. At the end of their set, their relief
was palpable. The evening culminated in a performance by the undoubted stars of the whole show, Tinariwen. This outfit is the pride of the desert. Every man, woman, boy and girl from Timbuktu to Tamanrasset and beyond can sing at least some of their songs word for word. Each member of Tinariwen has his aura, his legend and his mystique. Ibrahima, one of the founders of the group is a thin, world-weary looking man with a very mid-70s looking Afro. The story goes that, as a boy, he witnessed his father being murdered by Malian soldiers. In the late 70s, when the Sahel and southern Saharan regions were being throttled by drought and poverty, he left for Tamanrasset in Algeria and then joined one of Ghadaffis training camps in southern Lybia. There he met Hassan
and Intayedan, the other founding members of the group. In between courses
in Islam, Arab nationalism, socialism and freedom-fighting the young dispossessed
Touaregs would drink tea, play cards, tell stories, kill time and above
all.sing songs on the guitar. A whole new style took root in those camps,
based loosely on traditional Touareg music and the harsh melodies of the
one-stringed Touareg violin, but also incorporating influences such as
Bob Marley, the rebels of the Moroccan new wave like Nass El Ghiwane,
Bob Dylan together with other disparate influences, both western and middle
eastern, which managed to penetrate that far into the desert. The new
style was and is still known simply as guitar, because the instrument
is so central to both the music and image. Ibrahima is an intense and
quiet man. You get the impression that life has dealt him enough blows
to last one hundred lifetimes and your natural instinct is to respect
that and rejoice in the fact that at least music is there to communicate
his stories. Then there is Mohamed
Le Japonais, so called because he has the features of a Mongol warrior.
His deep sunk eyes and high cheek bones seem to belong to another world.
The only explanation I heard for his extraordinary physiognomy is that
Japanese and Chinese engineers used to work on oil installations in the
desert in the 50s and 60s and that maybe one of them is a relation. This
story seemed too far fetched. Le Japonais is also intense but in contrast
to Ibrahima, talkative as well. He was fresh from a spell in the Gao penitentiary
where he had been put after running amok with a stick of dynamite in a
drunken stupor. Like the rest of the group, he gave the impression of
placid steel with a hint of uncontrollable fire hidden below the surface.
His reputation as a fine and profound poet is widespread. In fact, the
poetic quality of Tinariwens lyrics was often alluded to by all who knew
them well. After Le Japonais came Hassan, aka Le Lion du Desert, who was
the oldest member of the group and a veteran of Ghadaffis training camps.
I never got to know much about this man except that the fierce spark in
his eye was more likely to ignite wry good humor and uncontrollable laughs
than anger. He seemed to be more economic with his words that his smiles
and was universally liked and respected by the others. After Hassan came
Abdallah, aka le Catastrophe. Why and how he became saddled with such
an unfortunate nickname I never found out. Abdallah was the youngest member
of the group and a favourite with the women. He was reputedly adept in
lyrical love-making and his voice was one of the finest in the group.
He was born into a family of devout marabouts, or muslim holy men and
his decision to pursue a career in music has caused a rift with his nearest
and dearest which continues to fester. When I interviewed Abdallah a few
days later, he made a deep impression on me with his rare combination
of kindness, good humor, humility and ferocity. Placid steel. All the
members of Tinariwen have that same irresistible aura of fierce politeness
and inviolable honour, derived no doubt from having faced down moments
of extreme danger during their lives. None more so than
the already legendary Kheddou, hero of the rebellion and saviour of the
PA system. It is said that Kheddou used to go into battle with his guitar
strapped to his back and his Kalashnikov in his hands
an image to
make The Clash green with envy. This tall lean man, with brilliant eyes
sunk deep into a rugged face, had seen action in southern Lebanon as a
mercenary in the pay of the Hizbollah movement. Once, his wounded body
had been doused in petrol and he owed his life to a faulty lighter. Legends
about Kheddou were thick and numerous, but only in the mouths of others.
The man himself was too modest to talk about his own exploits. On stage
Kheddou drew the most applause and adulation. He played the guitar fluidly
and effortlessly, like a cheched up acolyte of Ali Farka Toure, but somehow
meaner and leaner. He was also a fantastic minimal bass player. Tinariwen
produced a magical effect on the crowd causing the young Touaregs to stamp
and dance with abandon in front of the stage. It was clear that these
men were their heroes and mentors. The atmosphere of the evening was similar
to that of a blues dance in Bristol or south London. Grave appreciation
and wild abandon. There were few extrovert displays of cosy friendliness.
I felt that I owed it to the occasion to keep my wits about me. Standing in front
of the stage felt like being on a minute pleasure boat in the middle of
a vast and empty ocean. The festival site was just a speck of laughter,
dancing and colour in the surrounding darkness. At one moment I decided
to walk off onto the plain to take a leak. Privacy is impossible on these
flat and endless plains. Everyone can see your business. Touareg men have
this agile knack of squatting down like women when they urinate so as
to minimise their exposure. I just stood up like a scare-crow and let
flow. The silence engulfed the distant music and the air drowned the sounds
in its silvery ether. This was undoubtedly the strangest and most bewitching
night of music I had ever experienced. Thus ended the first of three days of superb music and unforgettable experiences. In the following 48 hours there were camel races, dune treks, a lot of talking, listening, sleeping in the midday heat and some excellent performances by Azawad, Super Onze de Gao, Tinariwen, LoJo and Justin Adams amongst many others. The Festival in the Desert was experienced by relatively few people but all of them took home memories which will prove as durable and precious as a 24 carat diamonds. The event proved .that you dont have to be big in the classic sense to dream and achieve big things. After a lifetime of surviving on the breadline in order to have the freedom to play what they want, where they want, LoJo have faced down their biggest challenge. Unless they get booked to play a festival on the moon, its unlikely that any live concert proposition, wherever it may be, will faze them. Sang-froid or what. For the local musicians and cultural activists, the Festival was a lifeline in the latest phase of their long struggle. Many of the old combatants now realise that the fight must be pursued with the weapons of media and mass communications, rather than swords and Kalashnikovs. Up until now theirs has been a largely hidden war, known to only a few mainly French desert enthusiasts and experts. On the back of the festival there have been prominent features in the French daily Liberation, The Times of England, Uncut Magazine and Billboard. A film is being prepared for broadcast on the Franco / German TV channel Arte. The recordings of Tinariwen are likely to surface either this year or early next year as a CD with European or even worldwide distribution. These are major victories in a propaganda war which has only really just begun. Despite their geographical isolation the Touaregs are astute and aware political observers. Listening to the BBC world service is a favourite pastime and they are acutely aware that they need to use these new weapons of mass communication if they are to have any hope to achieving their aims. As one of Tinariwen songs go : "If I could sing so that those in London could hear, then the whole world would hear my song".
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