Par Andy Morgan - 2011
(first published in 'Songlines')

Touareg guitar music is growing old. That’s not a put down. It’s not even a disappointment. It’s just a statement of fact. Like so many other styles, genres and movements that have been around for a while, Touareg guitar now has a past; the burden of its avatars, traditions and taboos is beginning to weigh down on its shoulders. It’s no different to what’s happening to rock’n’roll in general.
Ten years ago this summer, Tinariwen walked onto a stage at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark and played their first gig outside Africa under their own name. Some of the band had performed under their alternative moniker of Azawad at the Nuits Toucouleurs festival in Angers, France in 1999.  But 2001 was the year that Touareg guitar blues finally rolled into our living rooms and onto our stages, like a skeletal apparition from a dusty world beyond our imagination, singing about a desert and a culture that few of us knew anything about.  At the end of that year they released their very first CD ‘The Radio Tisdas Sessions.’

Just take a look at those Touareg guitars now.  Tinariwen have just unveiled their fifth studio album ‘Tassili’.  Tamikrest are sweeping away the confetti from  their second release ‘Toumastin’.  Bombino looks like the new kid on the block, but this year’s album ‘Agadez’ is actually his third. Tinariwen off-shoot Terakaft are surfing a swelling wave, generated by their own third offering; ‘Aratan n’Adagh.’  Toumast are scouting for ways to keep their excellent and sadly neglected second opus ‘Amachal’ alive. Etran Finatawa are taking a rest after promoting their fourth album ’Takkat Tajje’.  In the last year, sizzling new platters have been served up by relative newcomers Atri n’Assouf, Kel Assouf, Nabil Baly Othmani, Groupe Inerane, Ibrahim Djo, Amanar, Takamba Super 11 and Tilwat. No doubt there are others I’ve forgotten to mention; but that’s just the point. This isn’t the kind of scene you can bag up in a single paragraph anymore.

Tinariwen are also edging past the 750 live concert mark. South America, the last continent still virgin to the spiky delights of desert rock, should, if all went well, have been vanquished with Tinariwen’s visit to Rio de Janeiro at the end of August. Bombino, Terakaft, Toumast, Etran Finatawa, Takamba Super 11 have all been busy on the international stage in recent months. Others like Atri n’Assouf, Kel Assouf and Ibrahim Djo are less visible simply because their activities have so far been limited to France and adjacent bits of mainland Europe. In general, there’s hardly a global music festival of note that hasn’t got some cheched-up hand-clappin’ guitar-totin’ Tamashek-hollerin’ desert-rolling outfit on its bill somewhere. 

The Touareg guitar is also taking hold of North Africa and the Maghreb. Tinariwen have become phenomenally popular in that combustible part of the world and their music has coincidentally been co-opted to pipe the onward march of the Berber movement in Morocco and Algeria. Their appearance at the Timtar festival in Agadir, Morocco, in 2007 almost caused a Berber pride riot.
All in all, Touareg guitar (aka assouf, aka desert blues) music may be getting old, but it has never seemed so purposeful, so effervescent, so hopeful, so here, there and everywhere as it is now!  

We, that’s to say those of use who weren’t born and raised in the southern Sahara desert, have only known the genre in its fully fledged incarnation.  We missed its birth, childhood and adolescence in the Touareg barrios of desert towns like Tamanrasset, Ghardaia, Djanet and Sebha, back in the late 70s and early 80s when nobody except the young Touareg men and women who were part of the drama cared a flying fig about Touareg guitars or the movement they represented.  The rest of us can only look back at that era with the same insatiable fascination with which we look at the blossoming of the rural blues in the southern states of American in the 1920s and 30s, unseen and shunned, far from the grandiose and privileged gaze of the white middle classes who were later to consume it so avidly.
Now Touareg guitars are everywhere and the world seems to be consuming them avidly.  The style has drenched the musical culture of the Sahara like a flash flood, redefining its landscape.  “Take any ten Touareg youth at random and seven of them will be guitar players,” claims Serge, the articulate spokesperson and percussion player with Bombino.

That has to be a good thing, doesn’t it?  “Yes, it’s good for me,” says Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, founder of Tinariwen who, alongside the great and sadly lamented Inteyeden Ag Ablil, invented the modern guitar style. “It’s like, before, there weren’t many artists, when I was playing, me and Inteyeden.  Now there are many. When I count all the Touareg artists who are performing now, and touring, I’m very happy.”
Those new guitar bands have readily cast themselves in the mould that Ibrahim and Inteyeden created, with a little help from Ilyen ‘Diarra’ Ag Ablil, Inteyeden’s brother, now leader of Terakaft, back in the early 1980s; grinding pentatonic guitars, call and response vocals, djembe or calabash percussion, handclaps and lyrics that sing of awareness and revolution.  The new bands are all Tinariwen’s children to some degree.

"Tinariwen are the tree of Touareg music, and we’re the leaves and flowers,” says Ousmane Ag Mossa, lead singer of Tamikrest. In fairness, some new bands also consider themselves to be the half-children of Takrist n’Akal, Tinariwen’s equivalent over the border from Mali in Niger, and of it’s charismatic leader Abdallah Ag Oumbadougou, aka Abdallah du Niger, who went on to become the pivotal figure in the Desert Rebel project.

Whatever their parentage, at some painful juncture, children need to break free and make their own way in the world.  In the heat of its undoubted international success, Tinariwen’s signature style has mutated into a textbook that’s in danger of becoming a burden to the younger Saharan generation.  The new bands all realise that they need to find their own USP and differentiate themselves from the previous generation, and from each other. Ahmed Ag Kaedi, guitarist and founder of Amanar from Kidal in northeastern Mali, puts it neatly in a fascinating interview which he gave to Tamasheq.net, the essential online resource for all things musical and Touareg; “I regard him [Ibrahim from Tinariwen] very highly, as a man and a musician, but as far as I’m concerned, the best way to show that I respect him is to avoid imitating him.” 

With this scramble for distinctiveness, there have been many subtle additions and mutations in the core Touareg guitar sound in recent years, including drum kits (Bombino, Amanar, Tamikrest), flutes (Kel Assouf), violins (Kel Assouf, Nabil Othmani), a more flowery plectrum-driven guitar style (Nabil Othmani, Amanar, Bombino), a heavier rockier sound (Terakaft, Bombino), synths and drum machines (Tadrit), fusions with rap (Taliwen) or reggae (Terakaft, Tamikrest). 

Even so, to the outside ear, these innovations might feel like tinkerings rather than core redesigns.  I have often wondered what might result if a fearless group of Touareg musicians went back in time to the late 1970s, when Touareg guitar music didn’t yet exist, and fashioned something new from the original building blocks of the guitar style:  the teherdent lute of the Niger region griots, the traditional Touareg tindé drum and imzad one-stringed fiddle, the poetry of the traditional bards, the shepherd’s flute, the Arabic oud and more distant influences from the Maghreb and Europe. Instead of condensing all those flavours into a few electric guitars, voices, handclaps and percussion, they could use them to create something startlingly different, with a different line-up of instruments; brass maybe, or piano and keyboard, or a fully-fledged string section.

Of course, all this speculation is perverse.  The guitar was adopted so decisively by the young ishumar, the jobless Touareg migrants of the 1980s, for good reason.  It was portable, extrovert, worldly and cool, a universally recognised symbol of rebellion and youth, which is exactly what Tinariwen were all about at the time.  The irony is that on their new album ‘Tassili’, Tinariwen have sought to ditch the lashing electricity of amplified guitars, bass and percussion that has defined them since 2001 and delve back to the intimate acoustic sound of their ishumar years in the 80s and 90s, when music was often made by a campfire, out in the open solitude of the desert, with a few comrades lounging around, smoking, drinking tea and singing of their assouf. 

"When we began playing, it was always acoustic,” Ibrahim remembers. “The electric guitar is new, and then we started with the bass and all that.  It’s all new. When we used to put on little parties, sit down and sing with friends, and people would dance, it was with an acoustic guitar. I was a bit nostalgic for that sound.”
"Assouf’ is that unfathomable untranslatable Tamashek word that many Touareg now use to describe the guitar style.  You can only pin down its meaning by surrounding it with a cordon of approximate words: longing, loneliness, emptiness, home sickness, spiritual pain, duende, blues.

I can’t help feeling that Tinariwen’s move to a softer acoustic aesthetic reflects an ageing process going on inside the hearts of Tinariwen’s founder members, especially Ibrahim, who now seems ever more drawn to peace and quiet above all else, even revolution and the struggle. He recently moved out of the village of Tessalit and went to live in a river valley nearby, out in the bush, not far from where he was born.  He told me that he only moved because you can’t keep animals in the village, and he wanted to start a small herd of goats.  Maybe so…but I sense that peace and detachment have now become Ibrahim’s personal grail, a new chapter in his ever unfolding struggle against those who seek to control, tame and disturb his beloved desert home.

International success may have made Tinariwen a hard act for many desert hopefuls to follow, but the irony is that their own career was floundering before the fateful encounter with the French group Lo’Jo in 1998 that lead to their first trip outside Africa and ultimately to global fame. They weren’t performing much at the time, or if they were, it was often in isolated groups of two or four musicians. Inteyeden had died of some mysterious illness a few years before. Although their songs were still revered throughout the Sahara, a younger desert audience was looking for something new and fresh. I well remember being shocked and not a little angered in 2003 when a Frenchman who had been living in Kidal, Tinariwen’s hometown, told me that local audiences now preferred Ahmed Ag Kaedi’s band to Tinariwen. I thought he was bullshitting, but, back then at least, he could have been right.

Global success has speared those doubts.  The youth of Kidal, and of the wider Sahara, now see Ibrahim and Tinariwen as undisputed role models, both musically and spiritually. They might have more fun at a Tamikrest or Bombino concert, but Ibrahim is still the man. The adulation that dogged him at the Touareg Music Festival in Tamanrasset in southern Algeria, the unofficial capital of the Touareg nation, where Tinariwen performed after a 25 year absence back in January 2010 was both startling and unnerving to behold, like a strange manifestation of Beatle mania out in the gritty vastness of the Sahara. As another Ibrahim, who drums with Bombino, told me as we were brewing up a tea at last summer’s WOMAD Festival in Charlton Park, “He’s so kind to all of us young artists.  He’s just such a man…such a STRONG man!” 

That’s as may be, but the youth also need their own strength to face an ever murkier future.  I’ve often heard older Touareg, those of Ibrahim’s generation, doubt the motivations of the younger musicians.  They mutter that the new bands are only in it for the money; that they don’t understand the suffering that their ishumar forebears had to endure during years of drought and exile in the 70s and 80s; that, back then, no one cared, no one took any notice, there were no international tours, or record releases or brand new sparkling guitars and amps. There was nothing but a bunch of penniless exiles sitting around, smoking cheap local brands, playing the guitar and singing about their anger, their homesickness and their longing. 

An old veteran of the Touareg rebellion once said to me, “You know, there are only five Touareg artists who have ever possessed real assouf: Ibrahim, Inteyeden, Japonais, Abdallah Catastrophe and Diarra.”  He was prepared to concede that Ousmane from Tamikrest might one day be able to join that august group. 

It’s true that compared to the deepest, most tender starkly soulful music of Tinariwen, the newer bands often appear to be more about pure rock energy and entertainment.  But they’re young. They have the fire in their bellies and groins. And the battle they’re fighting today out in the desert is every bit as dark and stark as Tinariwen’s was back in the 1980s. 

In many ways, life in the Sahara is even worse nowadays.  It’s certainly more complex.  A multitude of different enemies and threats lurk behind the dunes.  The Touareg rebellion has been knocked squarely off the front page by the murderous presence of mafia gangs posing as Islamic extremist militias allied to Al Qaeda, who have effectively closed the desert off to the outside world.  All those NGOs, those tourists, those festival goers who used to provide a valuable source of revenue and friendship, a link with an outside world that has so often eluded the Touareg throughout their history, no longer come.  They’re too scared.  “I met an old nomad,” Ibrahim told me recently, “And he just said, “We used to see vehicles passing by all the time, but now we see no one.  Where have they gone?”  He was sad.”

The Festival in the Desert has managed to continue operating with a relative sense of normality.  But for the last two editions, it has had to decamp from the silky white dunes of Essakane to relative safety within Timbuktu’s city limits.  Despite all the criticisms that have been leveled at the Festival over the years, objectively, it’s value has been immense, not least in launching the careers of a number of Touareg guitar bands who are now very much present on the European and North American circuits.  They include Tamikrest and Etran Finatawa.
But elsewhere, fear roams the desert.  Traffickers who used to carry a quaint payload of Malboro cigarettes, illegal diesel and cooking oil, now transport hard drugs, weapons and humans.  Planeloads of cocaine fly in from South America, disgorge their corrosive cargo into huge convoys of 4x4s which disappear eastward towards Egypt and the Middle East. Dark mutterings abound of high level government involvement in these various illicit activities.   The world covets the uranium and oil under Touareg soil. France fears the motivations of America, and both are shit scared of China. The Touareg are a tiny minority, a mere pawn in a much larger and scarier game. 

"In the Touareg lands there’s Al Qaeda, the bearded ones,” Ibrahim reflects. “But it isn’t good for the Touareg because the Touareg are always being confused and mixed in with all that.  The truth is that Touareg are scared. They’re scared of Al Qaeda. They’re scared of the Malian army. They’re scared of the French army. They’re scared of it all. They don’t know what’s happening because the Touareg are only a small community in the desert. They’re poor. They’re the ones who are left behind. They don’t even have the strength to understand what’s happening. They see people going by. Cars. But they’d don’t understand.”

And then there’s Gadaffi.  His influence in Touareg life and politics has always been immense, opaque and dubious.  Now he’s in his bunker, and many Touareg, especially the cadres in Bamako and Niamey who have at some point or another benefited from his largesse, are concerned about a post-Gadaffi Libya.  He is after all, they argue, the only head of state who has ever openly supported the Touareg cause.  Damn, he even called himself a Touareg once, during a famous speech he gave in Ubari in southern Libya. 

Others, including Ibrahim, see things differently.  “No, no, Gadaffi hasn’t helped the Touareg,” he says with notable firmness. “It’s the Touareg who have helped Gadaffi. If you look at the Touareg territories in the desert, in Mali, around Kidal, Gadaffi has never done anything there.  Gadaffi has helped Mali, he’s built loads in Bamako, but not in the north.  There are some Touareg youth who have gone to fight for him. But they’re just fed up with hanging around, with no work, doing nothing. They just say, “I’ll go and fight for Gadaffi and maybe I can earn some money.”  That’s what it’s all about.”

So there’s still assouf a plenty in those immense plains, those oueds with their skeletal accacia trees, those black basaltic hills, those camps, villages, towns and cities, those endless horizons, that suffering Sahara.  And thankfully there are also plenty of young musicians who can sing that assouf to the skies, magnetically, beautifully and loud enough for all of us to hear. Raise awareness! That’s been the Touareg guitar mission since Tinariwen’s earliest days.  At first it was directed at Tinariwen’s own people, flung far and wide in nomad camps and villages throughout the desert.  For ten years now it’s been directed at the rest of the world.  The new breed of guitar bands are every bit as engaged in it as Tinariwen ever were.  Thanks to them, we can try to understand the tragedy that continues to unfold in one of the most isolated and awe-inspiring places on earth.


L'auteur
Andy Morgan est un journaliste freelance anglais. Manager de Tinariwen de 2004 à 2009, il a beaucoup écrit sur la musique africaine en général, et la musique touarègue en particulier. L'intégralité de ses écrits sont en ligne sur www.andymorganwrites.com.

Du même auteur
The Rough Guide to the music of the Sahara
Kel Inedan – The Touareg blacksmiths
Festival in the desert – 2001, A Saharan Odyssey
Festival in the desert – Hope through music
Gaddafi and the Touareg

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