The rest of the way from Nibkitieid to Essakane was basically more of the same thing. With every new roll of the wheels we grew more impatient for the ride to end. The more you couldn’t move, the more you ached to. And whenever you managed to pull off a slight move, somebody would end up in an even greater discomfort.
In one such case I made two Polish girls, who were sitting in the middle of the truck bed, even more miserable.
„Sorry,“ I said to the more affected one. She smiled and feebly indicated that she was fine. Under circumstances, naturally.
„This is OK,“ she said. And then added:
„We already travelled like this to Gao.“
Gao, of course, was the easternmost settlement in Mali to which westerners could reasonably go without major risks from desert bandits. Everything beyond that was more or less a no-go zone.
„To Gao? How long did you take?“
„Sixteen hours,“ she said.
„Sixteen hours?! One way?“
„Yes.“
I frowned at the very thought of it.
„Was it worth it?“ I asked already anticipating the answer.
She shook her head with a mixture of grimace and smile and said:
„No.“
Just as I thought.
But nothing lasts forever, as everyone learns sooner or later, so there could be no exception to this mixture of torture and adventure. After a while, maybe even a bit longer than what it had taken us from Tombouctou to Nibkitieid, we arrived at a loose mudstone gate in the middle of desert. It was a gate to nowhere, without any walls to fit in, and there was nothing to tell you why it was precisely there and not somewhere else. Because on the face of it, there was no meaning to it at all.
Except that it was the entrance gate to the Essakane festival grounds, if I may call it that way. Our truck stopped in front of it and that’s how we knew where we were. There were two or three guys there and they were in the capacity of ticket-selling staff. Before we knew it, as soon as we all had grabbed our belongings, the truck we’d come on lit up from the spot and disappeared in a cloud of desert dust. That was it.
I don’t think locals paid the same prices as we westerners did. I’m not sure they paid any entrance at all, in fact. But what they demanded from us foreigners was obviously more than enough to cover everything, locals and tourists combined. That said, none of the guys who’d come with me had a ticket. Except me. And when they heard, or more to the point, had it confirmed that it would indeed cost them a nice and tidy sum to the tune of hundred and fifty euro to enter and honour the event with their own presence, everybody, without exception, lost any enthusiasm and zeal for Tuareg music. Suddenly, to all of them, silence seemed to be more desirable than anything they might hear inside. In other words, none of them exactly rushed in.
I approached one of the guys who spoke English a bit better than the others and informed him that I had already paid for the ticket and that now it was with Guele. For all my worthy efforts, my statement left the guy unfazed. For the simple reason that he had no idea who Guele was in the first place. I tried to explain that he was my tourist agent and that I had signed up with him a few days back, paid everything in advance and been told that I could come in as I arrived. But to no avail.
Suddenly, all of us started seriously pondering architectural context of the gate, i.e. the fact that it stood apparently in the middle of nowhere. After all, was there any fence to crawl under? Any wall to crawl over? None whatsoever. Any guards to dodge? None that we could see. So what was there to stop us from just picking up our stuff, wondering off out of sight and elegantly entering, away from this weird gate? On the face of it, not a thing.
OK, I can’t speak for others, but there was one thing that spoke in favour of my giving it just one more try with the gate staff. Truth to say, light as you may try to travel, when you are away from home for weeks on end and all your belongings for the trip need to fit in just one piece of luggage, it can’t possibly be feather-light. So before I would be down on lugging it ankle-deep through the Saharan sand, I offered one final compromise. I proposed to leave my luggage right there, under their eyes, while I looked for Guele inside. That would be a guarantee that I wouldn’t try anything they didn’t like.
And that worked. The idea finally looked reasonable to them and I was given a pass to go.
In just a few minutes I started seeing people. And vehicles. And camels. And tents. In a strangely relaxed way, everything was nevertheless abuzz. And the area covered with this activity was huge. How on earth was I ever going to find Guele there? But I had to, one way or another. So I just pressed on, wherever that was going to take me.
And of course, in such cases, someone up above always sees to it that everything turns out just fine. In this case, I heard somebody call me. I turned around and saw a young black lad. Honestly, I had no idea who he was, but luckily it wasn’t the case with him. He obviously knew exactly who I was. Right after one or two sentences I realised that for all my cluelessness about him, he clearly remembered me from somewhere in Mopti. And not only that. He knew exactly that I was there with Guele. Well, he was not with Guele himself. He was there in his own, separate arrangement. But the fact that he knew him was enough for me to ask him to find him for me.
The young lad happily obliged and it even seemed as if he knew precisely where to go. I followed him like a gawk, wondering how you could possibly get your bearings in this sea of white sand and apparently cookie-cutter tents. But we trudged on and only after one slight loss of the way, pretty soon we stopped in front of a group of tents where I recognised our cook. Hat off to the lad.
Guele was not there, but the youngster didn’t see it as much of a problem. We agreed I’d stay and wait, while he would go and fetch him from wherever he was at the moment. The next second he vanished and Barbara popped up out of somewhere. For some reason, she seemed genuinely pleased to see me and we greeted each other as cordially as old friends do. Well, I was most certainly pleased to see her. If she was there, then the last trace of a possible doubt as to Guele’s whereabouts was now removed from my mind. I was now fully at ease.
We chatted a bit about Tombouctou and yesterday’s edition of the festival. She claimed the music had been great and even said how some big name had been on stage. So according to what she was telling me, I had already missed one big gun. Except she couldn’t remember who it was exactly. Anyway, he’d been „very good“.
And so, while we jabbered, Guele himself finally put in an appearance, followed by the young lad and said by way of greeting:
„So you arrived?“
„Yes,“ I said. „But I left my luggage at the gate. I can get it when I show them that I paid the ticket.“
Guele nodded. Out of his pocket he produced a bunch of paper wristbands and handed me one.
„Put it on,“ he said. „That’s your ticket.“
On my way back to the gate, the young lad hung on to me. Having undoubtedly done me a favour, he considered it legitimate to ask something in return now. And that would preferably be in the form of my visiting his shop and hopefully splurging on some of the souvenirs or handicraft items tourists often buy and then back home invariably realise they can’t think of one single purpose for the stuff they brought along. But the kid had rendered me a service. There was absolutely no doubt about that. So I had no heart to send him packing just like that. And that’s never been my style anyway. Therefore I tried diplomacy.
„I’m sorry, but I can’t go now. You see, I’ve just arrived and I need to pick up my luggage now, settle in my tent, then eat...“
„But later?“
„Yes, maybe later,“ I tried to come out of it as uncommitted and evasive as politeness would allow me. The lad nodded. At least for now, I bought myself some time.
Back at the gate, seeing me with the wristband on, the guys who were selling tickets were much friendlier and more forthcoming now. One of them even offered he was sorry for my inconvenience.
„Don’t worry,“ I answered in the most generous of moods, now that everything was solved the way I’d been looking forward to. „You just do your job.“ On the best-of-friends terms with the gate staff, I started back to the group of tents that belonged to Guele. None of the foreigners who’d been with me on the pick-up truck was in sight any more. Whether they swerved on their heels and decided to return to Tombouctou or they sneaked somewhere through the non-existent perimeter barrier of the festival grounds, I had no way of knowing. In fact, for all I knew, for all the scorn and loathing they had felt for the ticket price and subsequently manifested it without any reservation, they might have even paid at the end of the day.
But truth to say, that particular piece of knowledge was of no significance to me.
The young lad offered to carry my luggage for me. I declined his offer, feeling that if I accepted it, I’d only feel further indebted to him and find it harder to give a wide berth to his shop. But he insisted and eventually prevailed on me.
How did I feel walking after him? I don’t know. Suddenly I was not sure I felt good. And not really for the fact that I might have to visit his shop later. Actually, what made me feel uncomfortable – and even embarrassed - was a sudden image of myself, an iconic representation of a walking ATM in the minds of more than one African, who was above carrying his own luggage, and instead had a black local porter to do it for him. It didn’t even matter that I was not nearly as rich as most of Africans thought. I mean, very few of us independent travellers are. But that was beside the point. The point was, at that moment the two of us poignantly fit the less than flattering stereotype. I would have so gladly taken my luggage back.
But it was too late. That would have been even clumsier.
When we reached the tents again, Katrin and Lea were there as well. As far as tents went, they seemed to be my first neighbours. We greeted each other cordially and one by one our little group seemed to get together again. Or what was by now left of it. I was told that Sandy had obtained himself a press pass and as such moved completely to the large tent for the press corps. Karen, naturally, was with him. He had not had any previous accreditations, but his cameras and lenses must have looked so formidable that they had intimidated the organisers into giving him a belated pass on the spot. So in effect, the two of them were not with us any more.
And Peter? He occasionally dropped by, but he stuck with his fellow Americans most of the time. So now that I had arrived, we were basically down to four people. Well, that may have explained why the ladies were quite happy to see me rejoin them.
Katrin and Lea went their own way for now, and Barbara and I started exploring the area together. In fact, as I was a newcomer, she was the one who led the way and I followed. The Essakane Festival in the Desert seemed to be not just about music. Or perhaps it was about music only to a smaller extent. The larger extent, as far as locals were concerned, belonged to three or four days of heavy concentration of western tourists whom they could now try to milk of as much money as luck would have it. Not everybody had a cook as we did, so there was food on sale in many places, cooked and raw. There were drinks, too, wherever there was food and then some. Souvenirs and handicraft items were on sale like there was no tomorrow. Tuaregs with camels prowled the area in search of whoever was in a mood for a camel ride.
And as for tourists, their numbers could easily hold their own against – or even put to shame – the crowd on St. Peter’s Square in Rome or in front of the Buckingham palace during the change of guards in London. I wouldn’t bet my money on it that this festival would draw half, or even third of the foreign attendance it had, if it had been staged in, say, Bamako. By the looks of who was there, if I was any judge to it, the appeal of the whole event lay in the setting, first and foremost. It was sand and tents that rendered it so famous. And glitzy in local terms.
Neither Barbara nor I were in for any shopping, but it was fun to navigate stalls and makeshift tents, or shops, as locals called them, where they sold their goods. Whenever you displayed a slightest sign of interest, you were immediately accosted and cornered into a round of heavy advertising on all possible advantages and excellence of the item in question. It invariably took a hard work and unrelenting effort to get away with your purse unscathed.
But Barbara was doing fine and obviously enjoyed herself quite a bit.
And not only that. As this was evidently an event on national scale in Mali, there were TV crews crisscrossing the area and one of them bumped into Barbara and me. Naturally, between her and me, she was a logical choice for an interview. So they stopped her and asked her for a short impression. As I wouldn’t appear as those folks who push their way into the background of the scene and from there wave hello and smile broadly to their mother, wider family and neighbours, I retreated to a safe distance and left Barbara to her own predicament.
When some minutes later she rejoined me, she proudly exclaimed:
„I gave my first interview in French!“
„Really?! Then you’re great.“
„I don’t even know how I gave it,“ she added. „I can’t speak French.“
„Well, if you gave it, then you have to know some. At any rate, better than me.“
Our wanderings led us away from the hustle and bustle, and some way off in the distance, pretty much on its own, almost isolated, I saw the stage. Ever a musician in heart, I declared that I’d like to see it.
„Now?“ Barbara asked.
„Needn’t be now,“ I said. „It can be later. But I just like to inspect it.“
So as we both kind of felt first signs of hunger, we decided to now check if the lunch was ready and leave the inspection of the stage for after that. And so we returned to our tents.
By the looks of it, our cook was busy with her pans, pots and cauldrons from daybreak till bed time. I was there for far too short yet to voice any conclusive opinions, but Barbara assured me that it was precisely the case. Given the fact that the cooking lady didn’t cook only for us - our group, I mean - and that fire cooking is notoriously slow, then there was nothing to wonder about. If anybody had earned their wages in the Essakane desert, our cook seemed to be right around the top of the list.
The lunch was ready and everybody could find something to their liking, even vegetarians like me. While we were at it, Barbara briefly dove into her tent and gave me a leaflet which she had picked somewhere the day before and which contained the programme and entire bill for all of the three days of the festival. None of the names meant anything to me, and I couldn’t recognise any act, much as I tried, not even the „very famous“ one that had performed the night before. The only exception was Vieux Farka Touré. His name rang familiar and Barbara told me she’d heard he was the son of Ali Farka Touré. Now that was the guy I knew. But he wasn’t appearing at this year’s festival. Probably because he’d been dead for some three years now. Only his son Vieux – if it was his son – did. But even he wasn’t going to play until tomorrow night. Anyway, just for the record, I copied all the names in my notebook. You could never know who might be worth remembering.
And then after lunch, Barbara and I resumed our wanderings in the sand. We decided to go to that stage now, though we didn’t make a beeline for it. It was more in a roundabout way, even if none of us was sure why we ever got sidetracked. But I suppose there was a certain appeal in the sheer knowledge that we were in Sahara, and wading through the sand was an experience of the same quality as wading in the first, fresh winter snow. Particularly for me.
But eventually, we got to the stage. It was a modest concrete structure, painted all in white, with a generously-sized banner of the deep orange, containing the festival logo, as the background. Light equipment was nothing on the scale of what you could call grand, but I knew that I was in Mali – and in the desert, at that – and you just couldn’t expect things here in one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world to be on the Star Trek level same as you take them for granted in Europe. You just had to give recognition to every bit of an effort the local organisers had put into the whole thing and to the fact that they had kept it for nine years now on the trot.
„Let’s go up!“ I said to Barbara.
„I don’t think we can,“ she expressed her suspicion.
„Let’s try,“ I wouldn’t give up just like that.
On the right-hand side of the stage, looking from in front of it, as a part of entire construction, there was something like a small box-like structure, with an opening for a door, except without a door pane, with stairs and probably enough space somewhere inside to serve as a dressing room. Through it, as it appeared, you could access the stage. Not only there were no guards in sight, but there wasn’t anybody at all. Or so it appeared. So I decided to impertinently just go in and see where it would get me. Barbara followed me but only with half a heart.
However, before we could even go in, a guy popped up from inside. Switching to my politest and most courteous manner on the spot, I greeted him and said:
„I am a musician, so if it’s not a problem, I’d like to see the stage. Can we go in?“
I don’t think that anywhere in Europe, at least on a festival of international fame and importance, they would lend you as much as second glance, let alone allow you to go onstage and possibly make a mess of the hard work they’d done of connecting it all into one single operating system. Without proper credentials you couldn’t get anywhere near. But here in Essakane, my word was good enough and the guy was only happy to indulge us.
Now with the official sanction in pocket, Barbara was much happier to join me and a few seconds later we stood where artists had been standing the night before and would be standing again later today. One or two guys were still doing some cosmetic adjustments, but it seemed that, more or less, everything was ready for the second installment of the event. While I was inspecting the equipment, Barbara was already happily chatting with the staff. They seemed only too happy to accommodate and entertain their western visitors. Of course, you can never be sure that everyone is well- meaning and there is some justification in stricter caution on such events in Europe. But most of the people are, just as Barbara and I proved in this case, and they don’t want to sabotage an event they basically travelled from half the world away to see. That seemed to be exactly the thinking of the guys who let us come up.
When my curiosity was satisfied and Barbara explored all the topics with the stage crew guys, we left the stage and started roaming back towards the crowd. People entertained themselves in many ways. There were souvenir sellers and there was music in several spots where tiny groups of people danced and sang, sometimes with very modest sound equipment, sometimes without any whatsoever, probably always in their own private, unofficial arrangement. There were places where you could have a drink or a snack, often rustled up on the spot in the simple form of fried eggs, sliced tomatoes, boiled rice and similar stuff. We wandered apparently aimlessly, always towards what looked like the next most interesting thing from where we happened to be standing. In such a way, we let the surroundings decide where we would end up.
Just watching the crowd was an entertainment in its own right. Seeing all those desert attires, long robes and turbans in all conceivable colours, I knew that at least for us westerners this festival was much more than just music. Maybe the music was the centrepiece of the whole thing for the locals. OK, for some of them, at least. Those who hadn’t come with an eye on palming off as many souvenirs on tourists as possible. But I’d bet that for the vast majority of us westerners, music was only distant second. And as a musician myself, maybe with shame, I’d have to confess that I belonged among that vast majority, as well.
Snaking through the crowd like that, Barbara and I eventually arrived at a spot where they’d set up a café. Judging by its looks of a small, low, unprepossessing structure whose architectural ambitions soared to lofty heights of an oversize shoe-box, and a terrace that distinguished itself by simply being a space covered with some sort of canvas, loosely fastened to the tops of a number of vertical wooden beams, this place would be a bottom-tier joint even in places like Douentza or Korioume.
But judging by the clientele it attracted - without an exception white tourists, and apart from the waiter inside the shoe-box structure, no locals within a wide circle – here it had to be the most upscale and poshest spot you could find. And not only that. On one of the wooden poles, the one you were bound to notice first, they affixed a piece of green paper with a hand-written note that literally read „conférence, Haira Arby, 17 h 30“. I assumed that it announced a press conference with someone called Haira Arby in the spotlight.
As for who this particular lady was, I had no idea. I had to admit that I knew next to nothing about the music we were treated to here in Essakane. My musical tastes lay worlds away from what Tuareg and their neighbours sang. Musically, I just spoke an entirely different language. But this lady seemed to have carved out a name for herself here in this land, and the fact that I knew nothing about her was only my fault. Coming from the relative neighbourhood, just some way off to the north from Tombouctou, she should be quite at home in Essakane. Not really a Tuareg herself, but rather half-Arab and half-Berber, she kind off added to ethnic mix among this year’s acts. Dubbed fondly „the nightingale of the north“, she must’ve been the darling of the local music consumers. Was she a star? I had no idea. I had to presume so. Otherwise, why would they announce her press conference like this?
The only thing that didn’t square with her press conference at all was the fact that the official leaflet Barbara had given me during lunch hardly offered any hints on her appearance. She wasn’t even mentioned there. So she was here? But when would she perform? Or had she performed already, maybe?
That particular piece of puzzle remained unsolved. At least for now. Whether I was going to be any smarter later, only time would show.
Anyway, Barbara seemed to be rather exhausted by our wanderings, so she expressed a desire to join the crowd at the café and have a drink. I had no objections myself, so for a while we sipped orange juice and watched the crowd out there. I guess, without ever openly discussing it, we both kind of agreed to wait and see what the press conference would look like and who Haira Arby would turn out to be.
But 17.30 came and went, and then it was followed by 18.00, and nothing extraordinary was happening yet. Or was the old conference taking place elsewhere? We didn’t ask. So if it was, we never found out. The bottom line was, at one point Barbara asked if we should go and we just left.
In these parts, so much closer to the equator, night falls considerably faster than back home up north, so it wasn’t going to be too long now before the second festival night would kick off. But we were still maybe an hour away from real night. So we wanted to make a good use of the remaining light and remain on the move.
The sky was still some way off from being pitch black. With the waxing moon to the east and last sunrays, now just above and soon from below the horizon to the west, the visibility was still quite decent. The two of us set out back towards the stage. However, some distance to the right from the stage, on a large dune, there was a huge mixed crowd of locals and tourists, of humans and camels. Naturally, we would not let it go unchecked.
But once there, we faced a kind of minor letdown. Yes, the people were there in numbers. A lot of them were sitting on that huge dune, as if on makeshift terraces of a football stadium or classical theatre. But there, where the show would have been – or should have been – there was literally nothing. So all those people were either still lingering after something that must have come to a close not so long before, or having a peculiar kind of fun by just being there as a crowd.
Just across from the dune where everyone was still sitting for a purpose still unfathomable for me, there was another dune, with another crowd. Somewhat smaller, but respectable anyway. And those other guys were standing. As the first crowd appeared to be a dud, Barbara and I decided to give the second one their chance and check out what they were up to. This time we were luckier. When we got near, we realised there was some live music on a large patch of red canvas-like fabric that served as the „small stage“. This big piece of red was simply laid on the sand, slopes and all, and along its edges there were a fair number of Tuareg men, all of them standing, clad in long, azure or white robes and head-pieces, almost completely covered and shielded from human eyes, except for their hands and slits for their eyes. On the opposite side of the red patch there was an even more handsome number of women, all of them sitting, dressed in what an uninitiated guy like me would - probably falsely – term as burkhas. In any case, a long robe which covers entire woman’s body except for her face. Those burkhas, if I may call them so, were in colours ranging from black to indigo to brown to orange, all of them shiny and all of them richly decorated.
In the free space between them there was a set of microphones and a modest sound equipment to the side. They sang, some of them danced, and many, mostly sitting women, clapped to the tune. A lot of people gathered around them, locals and tourists alike, and that was the audience to this rather informal gig. Barbara, ever communicative, soon learned from someone standing next to her in the crowd of onlookers that this particular troupe of singers and dancers hailed from Niger.
We lingered there for a while, until first signs of serious activities on main stage could be unmistakeably perceived. And then Barbara decided she wanted to have dinner before we fully turned our attention to music. So we rushed back to our tents. Sure enough, our cook was as much at it as she’d been when we had left her several hours before. So Barbara didn’t have to wait to start dining.
As usual, my eating deadline for the day expired with the onset of darkness, but I was glad we had returned to our tents anyway, since the moment the sun had dipped behind the horizon, it grew considerably cooler. It was going to be my first night in Sahara and it was now obvious that no mosquitoes would be bothering me tonight. I prepared a warm sweater as I could already clearly sense on my own skin that those stories about temperatures dropping sharply overnight in deserts were neither fibs nor fabrications.
When Barbara finished her dinner, we were ready to go.
By the time we reached the stage, the official programme was already under way. We mingled with the crowd and gradually, inch by inch, edged closer to the stage in order to attain us a better view. Of course, quite naturally, I was immensely intrigued by what I was going to hear. This was my first real, close encounter with the desert blues as westerners tended to fondly dub it. Many in the west raved over it in apparent transports of sheer delight, and even when you listened to Barbara, and her recounts of reactions in the audience the night before, you were growing certain that you were in for a special treat in the form of a top class menu.
So, why not partake of it now that I had gone to such great lengths to be here?
The first act we got to see was Samba Touré. He was there with a bunch of guys, maybe his own band, maybe just a pick-up outfit. I had no way of knowing. In any case, the good old Samba was said to have been a protégé of Ali Farka Touré himself, about the only guy from these parts I’d ever heard of before. I guess that was about as good a reference as a musician playing desert blues can have. The guy had a strong rhythm section with a drummer, two percussionists and a bass player. Then there was another guitarist who was lending him a hand in terns of harmonies, I think. The whole line-up was rounded up by two guys whose department was harmony vocals. Finally, towards the end of his own show, a wonderfully dressed lady, in one of those richly ornamented indigo burkhas, joined him on stage, probably entirely out of the script and started dancing. The crowd liked it very much and reacted in a very welcoming way.
And how about me? Well, I had to own up to a letdown. Had I expected more? I don’t know what I had expected. In any event, with all due respect to his best efforts, Mr Touré left me pretty much cold. When he left the stage, I was one of those who just couldn’t care to hear his encore. There was none, either.
Why did I feel like that? Well, before I was able to shape any opinion, I was still pretty curious about following acts. The next one was a bunch of six people, one woman and five men, out of whom three sat right down on stage and took to some traditional percussion and string instruments. The remaining three, the woman and two men left, started singing and dancing. However, if Samba Touré had been inadequate, at least measured against my own expectations, this next group, whose name I never learned, very soon got to be almost irritating. Of course, to avoid any wrong conclusions, the crowd, in good part consisting of us westerners, received them very warmly. So I’m speaking of my own impressions all the time. And by the time they left the stage, those impressions started gradually adopting a more coherent form.
In fact, the sitting guys remained and the dancing crew was replaced by a group of several female singers. They were all fabulously dressed, in spectacular long white robes, full of ornaments, and each lady had a head-piece made of what to me from my spot looked like golden coins, or their imitation at least, fully in the mould of an image westerners usually have in their minds of Muslim women. They even sang considerably better than the trio preceding them. So at first they were much more interesting and entertaining than anything I’d seen so far, and for a while a hope sparkled that there just might be an outside chance for me to even enjoy myself. However, my hopes were pretty much short lived. I guess that no matter how hard I tried, this was simply not the type of music that reached me.
Barbara, on the other hand, seemed to thoroughly enjoy herself. She was first toe-tapping and then even swaying in the rhythm of the sounds that were coming from the stage. So after a while she had an eye on getting closer to it. In fact, that was not so hard at all. Right in front of the stage there was a number of people who were just sitting on the sand and from this sitting position followed the unfolding events. And around and behind them were the rest of us who were just standing. Barbara and I managed to push through almost to the edge of the standing rows which, to my surprise, was not that hard at all. I mean, according to some estimates, total number of visitors at the festival and its grounds was hovering around four thousand. That may or may not have been true, but it sure didn’t look like a stretch to me. I’d say it was a pretty plausible number. Here in front of the stage, however, the crowd was relatively scarce. Just a few hundred of us. Putting it at five hundred could be quite generous. And for all the good will, most of the people were rather indifferent. Barbara with her vivid enthusiasm was in an obvious minority. I even recognised some faces from my trip so far, among them that guy from Djenné who had with indignation commented on the prices, protesting that they were „not shipping Michael Jackson or U2 in“. Anyway, he too was there and he too belonged among those select few who were rocking and swaying with the rhythm.
Anyway, once Barbara had decided to find herself a spot among those who were sitting, that didn’t prove to be such a tall order. Just as I said, the crowd was much scantier than I had been expecting it. She invited me to join her, but I declined, saying that I’d be fine where I was and that she should just go on regardless of me if she felt like being closer to the action. And so that’s how it was.
Next on stage was a group called Imarhane. That was a colourful line-up of at one point as many as twelve people and I’d say visually they beat everything that had been on stage before them. For me it was wonderful to see a bunch of Tuaregs, dressed as if fresh from a desert caravan, toting Fender guitars. Well, some of them at least. They too had their share of wonderfully dressed female vocalists and all in all, this merry bunch was fun to watch. Led by a guy with a nose like a hawk beak, they must have been one of the most improbable bands I’d ever seen. Those punk and heavy metal groups from the west, with their heavy make-up and dyed hair were on their best days hardly a patch on the visual spectacle Imarhane were offering so naturally and spontaneously.
However, by the time I got used to their looks, I also finally defined what my issue with this music was. For I obviously had a problem with it. OK, before I go on, for the sake of good form and fairness, I must admit that I simply didn’t understand it. And unlike those who pretended otherwise, I just owned up to it. They say that music is a universal language and I am the first one who’ll sign off on that one. However, in this particular case I just didn’t understand it. It turned out I was at a serious disadvantage by not knowing a word of Tamasheq, the Tuareg language. Because other than there, in the language, I just couldn’t perceive where the message could be coming from. I suppose that if I spoke Tamasheq, I’d have been smarter about it. This way, though, all I heard were basic, stripped-down phrases, four or five notes long at most, endlessly repeated, like a loop on a damaged vinyl record that would just never stop unless knocked off by force. Whole songs consisted of that one never-ending phrase, mercilessly going on for minutes on end, easily stretching into ten- or even fifteen-minute ordeals. And it was not the case with Imarhan only. All other acts had been like that.
With all due respect to traditions and roots which I didn’t understand, I have a heart and when I listen to music, I listen to it with my heart. I don’t listen to it with my mind, so I hardly ever pay attention to what particular genre some particular piece of music belongs to, or which particular trend it may be cool to follow or at least acknowledge at a given moment. Or what particular “message” someone was trying to convey. I have my seven chakras which filter out all that I don’t like and filter in everything that appeals to me. I am someone who on more than one occasion locked himself up in a room while listening to music, just so the outside world wouldn’t see me moved to tears I couldn’t contain. My point is, I know how to feel music with every fibre of my soul and I am unapologetic about the way I approach it. For me, there are no two ways about it. You either feel music from the inside, deep down in your inner core, or you don’t.
This evening I didn’t. Or more to the point, I did. It increasingly irritated me. OK, I’ve been simply brought up against different musical traditions. I must hand them that. Different musical language was the language that I spoke, different melodies, different phrases, different chord progressions, different solos. I know all that and so ultimately it’s not my intention to pass judgements on Tuareg music. Some people understand it, some – like me – don’t, and we should all live and let each other live. And respect each other and be brothers.
However, there’s one thing that’s got nothing to do with traditions. There’s this one thing that doesn’t know the borders of cultural backgrounds. It’s called musicianship. No matter what kind of music you play, you are either accomplished on your instrument or not. And that’s all there’s to it. And you need not „understand“ certain music, or certain language, to see if someone can play or not. If you are a musician yourself, in two nicks you’ll know who can and who can’t.
And this evening, at the Essakane Festival in the Desert 2009, nobody could play. Literally. I could choose to neglect all I said about loops and phrases that bore the crap out of you if I had seen only one musician who would wow me and get my jaw to drop in astonishment. And I know myself. I would have done so and probably gone up there to meet them personally. But what I saw was all for the eyes and nothing for ears. This musicianship bit was on a woefully low level.
And the clincher for me was a character called Mana Mint Chighaly. A guy from Mauritania who’d spent all evening sitting at one side of the stage, out of the way to other performers while they performed, but nevertheless there all the time, enthusiastically clapping and supporting every single act. Well, that was very friendly of him. But now he got his five minutes of lime-lights and when he picked up his own Fender Stratocaster, I knew in short order that my own misery for the evening hit the rock bottom.
A cigarette dangling from his lips, probably to give him an unmistakeable air of cool, his guitar stubbornly out of tune without his ever bothering to stop and do something about it, his singing a thing that would make a lawn-mower sound like a piece of meditation music, good old Mr Chigaly tortured us relentlessly from the word go. And he was absolutely unaware that he belonged to a very tiny minority of those who enjoyed what he did. True, somebody remarked that he was „bashing out killer riffs“, but my God, it would be a gross understatement to call it an overstatement. If music is truly a universal language, a language that knows no boundaries as I believe it is, then this guy was inventing them as he went. And I was a witness to it. All those who had preceded him on stage were obviously in a possession of a very basic vocabulary of that universal language. They just couldn’t express themselves properly. But old Mana topped them all. But in terms of music language, he was utterly inarticulate.
And as for his „killer riffs“? I don’t want to be mean, even if I know I’ll be crucified by all those world music lovers for saying what I’ll say now. But I can’t help asserting that my own guitarist’s ten-year old son, by no means a child prodigy, can thrash out any of those „killer riffs“ any time he pleases. And undoubtedly improve them considerably as he goes. Sorry guys, I can understand that I don’t understand Tuareg music. But there’s nothing to understand about someone’s ability or inability to play. I once saw Mory Kanté live in concert and I don’t understand his music any more than I understand Tuareg music. But Mory Kanté shone and sparkled throughout the show, his band dazzled us all, and I left the venue feeling elated and blessed for being richer by one such experience. And as for what I’d seen this evening in Essakane, in terms of musical accomplishment, most of the instrumentalists could at best land an audition with some up-and-coming teenage punk band in the west. Anything more demanding than that, they were simply not up to it.
And this amiable gentleman, our good old Mr Mana Mint Chighaly? Well, at least as far as I was concerned, his most notable accomplishment was to cut the evening short for me and send me dashing back to my tent. I just couldn’t wait for Bassekou Kouyate, the guy who was supposed to be the last name on the bill tonight. That would have been too much to me.
Nights in Sahara were supposed to be no child’s game and now I knew it for sure myself. Having cleaned my teeth, and having to go on without a shower, I soon retired inside my tent. I only wanted to jot down a few words, my first-ever diary entry under the torchlight, and then I would sleep. The music from stage was just a muffled echo coming from far away, with only a distant throbbing of bass frequencies, by no means disturbing anybody’s piece. So when I had scribbled away those few lines, I put my diary and pen aside, turned the torchlight off and went to sleep.
And then, probably already past the point of dozing off, Guele suddenly busted into my tent, tore off the blanket from me, adding by way of brusque explanation:
„This is mine.“
Just the way he’d appeared, he also disappeared. The only difference was that I was suddenly wide awake again. And a blanket shorter.
Well, I can attest to it that blankets are no luxury in Sahara overnight. What was I supposed to do now? The way I figured it out, the best I could do in present situation was to put on every single piece of clothing that could be reasonably put on. And hope it all would keep me warm enough throughout the night. They did, but only just. Without the blanket, with my wind jacket back in Ouaga with Annette’s folks, I barely scraped through the night without getting frozen solid.
I slept but I knew better and more comfortable nights. More than once I wished I had bought myself a blanket back in Tombouctou, in Dubai store. But wasn’t Guele supposed to provide it all?
