BOOK EXTRACT: “Tisrawt is a microcosm of Touareg society,” Melissa explains. “That’s to say, it is a group of people who come from many different clans. Some are pro-MNLA. Some are pro Ansar ud-Dine. Some are pro-Mali. Others say that it’s all nonsense. And the aim is to understand each other, to live together and work together on a common project.”
Category: Africa
MUSIC CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI (extract) – “We have come here to teach you the true faith”
BOOK EXTRACT: In important ways, the scenes of vandalism and destruction that were played out in Timbuktu following the Salafist takeover in April 2012 weren’t new at all. There was something very old about them. Mostly white Arabic or Hassaniya speaking men from the northern deserts were ‘teaching’ the blacks how to worship Allah in the ‘proper’ manner.
MUSIC, CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI (extract) – Music in the red zone
BOOK EXTRACT: Life in the early 1990s was convivial. There was music. Women felt free to come and go. Some people smoked cigarettes and drank alcohol. The bonds between those young Touareg, their music and their culture seemed strong and unbreakable. No one quite knows why some senior Touareg figures from the northeast, including Iyad Ag Ghali, began to succumb to the message of Pakistani preachers belonging to Tablighi Jama’at.
MUSIC, CULTURE & CONFLICT IN MALI (extract) – “We don’t want Satan’s music!”
BOOK EXTRACT: In Gao, a group of teenagers sat around a ghetto blaster listening to Bob Marley. A Landcruiser pick-up loaded with tooled-up Islamic police came by and seeing the reggae fans, stopped and accosted them. “This music is haram!” – forbidden by Islamic law – said one of the MUJAO men as he yanked the cassette out of the blaster and crushed it under his feet.
CATRIN FINCH & SECKOU KEITA – The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff, 20/03/2013
This was only a first taste but it was already golden, despite occasional rawness and hesitation, easily forgiven. With albums to be made, tours to be done and an inevitable maturing yet to come, the marriage of harp and kora seems blessed to be long, warm and fruitful.
SAHARA SOUL – Bassekou Kouyate, Tamikrest, Sidi Toure.
Listen to the spirits and they’ll tell you a deeper tale: that in that vast desert which outsiders are content to call a wasteland, there exists an endless calm, tranquillity and beauty that makes the nomad cry
What next for Mali?
Like a massive dose of chemotherapy administered to a patient with advancing cancer, France’s intervention in Mali will serve to halt and stabilise the situation. But negative side effects are inevitable, and a complete cure seems as far away as ever.
Northern Mali – Options, what options??!!
The Rubik’s cube-like complexity of Mali’s problems, especially in the north, presents one of the greatest conflict resolution challenges in recent African history. Success relies on solving a short list of pressing problems, each of which look like a challenge fit for gods not men.
What do the Touareg want?
A nation or people rarely if ever think as one. In the case of the Touareg, difference and disharmony is exacerbated by their vast desert habitat and dispersed nomadic lifestyle
ALGHABASS AG INTALLA – Interview with the head of the MIA
Alghabass Ag Intalla is undoubtedly one of the most important players in the drama that is current unfolding in the far north east of Mali. An opportunity to interview him was one that I could not refuse.
