(via Culture Desk: Rebel Music: The Tuareg Uprising in 12 Songs by Tinariwen : The New Yorker)
“Over the weekend, Tuareg rebels in West Africa made a rapid advance, capturing the cities of Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu. If Mali is shaped somewhat like a butterfly, the rebels now claim to control its entire vast northern wing. The Tuareg people, longtime camelback masters of the barren byways of the central Sahara, have fought repeatedly over the past fifty years for a desert homeland autonomous from the mostly Bambara-speaking south. This revolt is already their most successful by far, fuelled by an influx of Libyan weapons commandeered during Muammar Qaddafi’s last gasp. Today, the main rebel group, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (M.N.L.A.), claimed that they’ve advanced as far as they intend to, and said they’re ready to negotiate. But a splinter rebel faction called Ansar Dine wants to impose Sharia law across the country, and this morning its black flag was seen flying over Timbuktu…
The first Tuareg rebellion in Mali peaked in 1963, shortly after Mali gained independence from France. Many Tuaregs felt that this new country was nothing better than a new colonizer, controlling their desert lives from another distant capital. The uprising was a disaster. Tinariwen’s leader, the lanky, quietly intense Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, was a young boy then; his father was executed for helping the rebels. Ibrahim sang about that time in one of the first songs he wrote, “Soixante Trois”:
’63 has gone, but will return
Those days have left their traces
They murdered the old folk and a child just born
They swooped down to the pastures and wiped out the cattle…
’63 has gone, but will returnIbrahim was right about that. But first came a different kind of disaster: two awful waves of drought and famine in the Sahara, in the mid-seventies and eighties. Jobless and desperate, countless Tuaregs walked the long desert miles north to oil-rich Libya, where they hoped to scrounge a living as migrant workers. The Tuareg poet known as Japonais, a sometime member of Tinariwen, sings about those years in Libya in “Ahimana” (“Oh My Soul”):
Dear Mother, since the time I left for Libya with patient steps
I arrived but I have been feeling aimless
I search for the money I need by any means necessary
But it refuses to accumulate…“It was hard during the rebellion for me,” Ibrahim has said. “But it healed me. I forgot everything, even the death of my father. It was like therapy.” In a song called “Chatma,” he sings,
The fire has been burning for far too long
In our lost slumbers
For the burnt animals and the aged dead
At the gates of Kidal we must assemble
And fight
As strong as you might be
You will burn in your fire…”
