No matter where you have been or what you have seen, arriving in Timbuktu is a thrill. It used to take months to get there, across the Sahara or along West Africa’s malarial rivers. Either way, you risked your life. In January, I made it in a couple of days, by plane, by car and by ferry across the great Niger River, on my way to a music festival in the desert. Travelling more slowly would have allowed time for my eyes to adjust: to see the chameleons on the shade trees, to recognise the half-finished building as a plush hotel, to see the bead of condensation on the side of a chilled drink for what it was, a small miracle. But my eyes were still used to seeing Europe, and to them, Timbuktu seemed absolutely remote — dusty, a little drab and extremely exotic.
I stayed in a hotel reached by sandy piste, not road, a place where you might expect to find camels lounging outside your door. At night, I ate capitaine, the fleshy Niger fish, and drank cold beer with my feet in the sand. In the morning, I found the market full of traders from upriver Mali, downriver Nig-eria, from Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso. Mukhtar, a tall, doe-eyed Wodaabe from Niger, asked what I was looking for. “A chech,” I said: a turban. He had one on his head, which he was happy to sell for five pounds. I offered four. “I tell you what,” he concluded as he piled the metres of blue cotton onto my head, “how about giving me three?” You need time to adjust to the strange ways of Timbuktu.
Like almost everyone in the market, Mukhtar was going to the Festival au Désert, the extraordinary weekend-long musical bonanza being staged far out in the sands. I had ima-gined myself in a 4WD, leaving Timbuktu and heading into empty desert. The reality proved to be a little different: so many people were heading that way, in Jeeps and Land Rovers, big desert trucks and vans, that the journey quickly became a rally that my driver was only too happy to be a part of. For three hours, he spun the wheel and I banged my head, jarred my shoulder and held on for dear life as the world passed quickly by. Then, suddenly, we were near Essakane, the landscape changed and I was faced with another of those moments requiring adjustment: where I saw white sand, he spotted a music festival.
Eat your hearts out, Reading and Glastonbury. Nowhere on earth touches the white dunes of Essakane as a festival site. A makeshift gate had been erected; at it, a man wrapped a band around my wrist to show I hadn’t gatecrashed. In the desert? Somewhere beyond Timbuktu? The site looked just as I imagine a trans-Saharan caravan camp must have looked in the days when people went by camel, with tents stretching as far as I could see. In the middle was something you wouldn’t have seen in a caravan camp: two concrete stages and a block of latrines. These were the only permanent structures, built after the last festival. Since then, the wind had done its work and carved a natural arena in front of them. Everything else had been brought from Timbuktu and beyond: every open-sided goatskin tent, woven mat and sleeping bag; each microphone, cable, speaker and the many lights that flooded the stage at night, and the technicians to work it all; the charcoal burnt in braziers across the dunes to keep us warm; the copious meals of pasta and rice, mutton and vegetables, the water, and the tea, as dark as the Tuareg who brewed it for us, as sweet as his smile. The warm beer, the necessities and souvenirs laid out in the shopping area — everything had been loaded into vehicles or onto camels and brought out for the festival. It was a unique meeting of people and place, and everyone had come to hear sweet music drifting off into the heart of the desert.
But the desert hasn’t always lived with the sound of harmony: during the early 1990s, it was the scene of bloody conflict between the seminomadic Tuareg tribes and the Malian government. When peace was brokered in 1996, the tribes agreed to meet each year — as they had done since pre-Islamic times — to air their grievances. Whenever they met, there was singing, dancing and camel- racing. Someone recognised the potential, and the Festival au Désert was born. The first event, in 2001, was disturbed when bandits took control of the sound system; the second was blown out by violent sandstorms. But when 2,000 people turned up in 2003, it was clear the festival was going to work. Unexpectedly, the project has found global appeal: of the 2,500-odd people at the 2004 festival, 500 were westerners. So, what’s the attraction? Well, in part it is the exotic location: moonlight flooding the snow-white dunes. Another part of the attraction is the mix of people — it was a thrill to find myself among visitors from across northern Africa, Europe and even America. And in large part, the draw is also the Tuareg.
On that first evening, standing on the edge of a dune looking across a bowlful of people to the stage, I had been so absorbed in the music that I hadn’t noticed anyone settling behind me. When I turned round, I found that a group of Tuareg men had drawn up. Heads and faces swathed in turbans, mounted on camels, long swords by their sides, they might have looked intimidating had they not been sharing their hard saddles with dancing, joking, joyous children.
I already knew some things about the Tuareg: that for centuries they had herded through the Sahel, the borders of the Sahara, and traded across the desert; that at the beginning of the 20th century they had held out against the colonial French army long after all the other native forces had been defeated; and that they spoke Tamasheq, a Berber language used by about a million people. Timbuktu is the southernmost limit of their territory.
The festival gave me an opportunity to learn much more. From Cheick ag Baye, the man who organised our camp — and who had helped broker the peace in 1996 — I heard concern about how the Tuareg will keep their identity in the face of international attention. From one of the musicians, I learnt that Tuareg means “abandoned by the gods” — understandably, they prefer to be known by one of several other names, including Kel Tamasheq, people of the Tamasheq language. And over the three days, as I slept on just a mat in an open-sided goatskin tent, sat cross-legged to eat from a communal pot, bartered for drinks and crafts in the makeshift souk and watched the families around me, I caught a glimpse of Tuareg life.
So, there was the location, the mix of people, the Tuareg — and then there was the music. Some Malian music seems strangely familiar to western ears. Even though we might not understand the lyrics, the sentiments they seemed to be expressing became increasingly obvious as many of the region’s finest musicians appeared on stage. Among them was the world-famous Malian bluesman Ali Farka Toure, whose music is a heart-wrenching mix of Mississippi blues and traditional West African sounds. The diva Oumou Sangare, the blind duo Amadou and Mariam, and Ali Farka’s protégé, Afel Bocoum. Manu Chao and Damon Albarn had come from Europe to add some glitz. Each act, no matter how big the star, was introduced — at length — by a compere and then given 40 minutes onstage to wow us before making way for the next sounds. They started late each afternoon and went on well into the next morning, the cheers growing as the days went on.
The loudest cheers, though, went up for the Tuareg band Tinariwen. Ten years ago, they were involved in the struggle. They have given up their guns, but not the fight. “Our music expresses the struggles facing Tuaregs,” one of them ex-plained. “It speaks of our suffering.” And for all the fun on stage, suffering was high on the agenda. We were in one of the poorest regions of one of the world’s poorest countries.While musicians played and camel-riders raced, Tuareg leaders met with Malian ministers, diplomats and NGOs to find a solution to their problems, most urgently the lack of healthcare, education and jobs. As well as attracting the aid agencies, it had brought high-spending foreigners like me to town.
Of course, I was glad the festival was generating money for the local economy, just as I was happy to hear that the clinic set up for the event was treating hundreds of local people. But something so pleasurable hardly seemed like charity.
The moments that live most brilliantly in the memory are those spent wandering around the festival site. Unlike most musical events, this had no off-limits backstage area. In one tent, I joined a brass band from Congo, having fun the way they knew best, by playing music. Near another tent, a group of women were chanting to a rhythm beaten out on a makeshift drum: half a calabash upturned in a plastic basin of water, struck by a flip-flop. Late one night, when the live music had ended and I was heading back to my tent, I saw Tinariwen, Manu Chao and several members of Blackfire, a Native American punk band, sitting round a fire with guitars and drums. I stayed to listen to them jam, then crawled into my sleeping bag and let them lull me to sleep. Where else can you do that?
Anthony Sattin was a guest of Tim Best Travel. His book The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu is published by HarperPerennial (£8.99)
Travel brief
See the festival: the 2005 Festival au Désert will take place from January 7 to 9. Visit the official website, www.festival-au-desert.org. Tim Best Travel (020 7591 0300, www.timbesttravel.com), is running two festival tours to Mali: an 11-night trip, starting on December 31 and costing from £2,330pp, full-board, including flights from Heathrow with Royal Air Maroc to Bamako (two days’ drive from Timbuktu) via Casablanca and local transport; and a 12-night tour, starting on January 3 and costing from £2,270pp. Regional connections start at £55pp. Guerba (01373 826611, www.guerba.co.uk) is also running a trip to the festival. If you can’t get to Essakane in January, the first Festival sur le Niger is this year in the riverside town of Ségou (February 4-6; www.festivalsegou.org).
See the country: Mali’s other highlights include cruising along the Niger River to Timbuktu; Djenné’s market and mosque; and the Bandiagara Escarpment, home to the animist Dogon people. A 16-day tour from Bamako to Timbuktu, visiting Ségou, Djenné and Mopti, with a five-day trek in Dogon country and a three-day cruise to Timbuktu, costs £1,555pp with Explore (0870 333 4001, www.explore.co.uk). A 15-day tour, including Ségou, Djenné, Mopti, a three-day cruise to Timbuktu and three nights in Dogon country, with an emphasis on wildlife, starts at £2,595pp through Wildlife Worldwide (020 8667 9158, www.wildlifeworldwide.com).
The festival in your front room
To get a taste of Mali’s music, you can buy Festival in the Desert on DVD for £14.99. A CD of the same name costs £10.99. Both are available at www.amazon.co.uk. Or you can listen to a selection of Malian music, including Ali Farka Toure, at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/worldmusic.
