If you jump on a plane RIGHT NOW and get yourself to Mali in west Africa and somehow find your way out to Timbuktu and then get on the small town of Essakane and then hitch a lift to the gig, you just might make this year’s Festival Au Desert.
The Festival Au Desert has been running since 2001 and, according to the official website it origins lie in:
…the big traditional Touareg festivities, as Takoubelt in Kidal and Temakannit in Timbuktu, which represented for a long time a place for decision making and exchange of information among the different communities. At the beginning, there were songs and touareg dances, poetries, camel rides and games. Today, the Festival is opened to the external world and welcomes artists from other Malian regions, other African countries, but also from Europe and the rest of the world.
I’d heard about the Festival Au Desert somewhere in the more remote corners of the recent past but it hadn’t lodged in any of the files in my memory bank until I ran across this account of last year’s Festival by the self-described “cult artist, eclectic visionary, whatever the label” Hugo Race – a past member of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and over the years, and it appears currently, member of a host of bands.
In his feature article in the August 2008 edition of Overland, Race details the travels of his current band, Dirtmusic, from Paris via Mali’s capital, Bamako en-route to Timbuktu and Essakane:
We’re in the backroom of the Djembe Bar, Bamako, Mali, over on the northern edge of town where the streetlights thin out and the shadows gather…Our band is Dirtmusic, and this is where we belong.
…The night is hot and young, and I haven’t yet got a clear idea of what this vast alien city is about, although one thing rapidly becomes clearer as the night goes on: if Bamako ever sleeps, it’s only for a brief catnap between four and five in the morning. Families sit outside dim cement-box homes around a television, a Peugeot crawls by, raising clouds of dust, a stray dog takes a dump in a puddle and the mosquitoes are zeroing in on my body heat…I head back to the pensione and crawl under the mosquito net, but sound floods the room from several directions: the distant thud of street djembes, the saccharine soul of Lionel Richie from the karaoke club across the way and the orgiastic guitar solos of Santana from the bar below.
A delirium later, I’m packing my bags for the trip to Essakane. The call to prayer rises like an air-raid siren from the neighbourhood mosque and the last taxis roll down Rue 254 in the temporary calm before Bamako reanimates at first light.
Reading this takes me back to central Kenya when I was last there in September 2008, waiting for the ’short-rains’ to come – long, steamy nights spent looking skyward for rain and activities to distract your mind and body from the heat.
In the arid, medieval desert city of Timboctou, bizarre columns and facades are silhouetted against the whitening sky, and women and children sell dried banana skins and fish scales on the shoulder of the packed-dirt road. A skinned pig drains from a meat-hook near the facade of an evangelist church mission, reminder of a not so distant past in which missionaries, slavers and mining companies ‘explored’ Africa and sent back home the wealth of millennia.
Race writes well and obviously had a great time at the Festival – Dirtmusic got to play to a new audience and open up more than a few musical horizons:
During the course of that scalding afternoon, we play something like twenty-five songs, several of them ours, in various configurations: usually a couple of acoustic guitars, some unplugged electrics, two djembes, handclapping and, of course, everybody vocalising, including the two Tamikrest women whose ululatory cries make the hair rise on the nape of your neck. There’s a lot of discovery going on here and the excitement is palpable. A shifting crowd surrounds the tent entrance, with videoists and microphones and musicians like Mary-Anne, a violinist from Lawrence, Kansas, who we will later invite to play on the show that night making us five in performance. But by the afternoon our instruments and feet are dusted in sand and desert burrs, our hands and throats raw, our cassette tapes all used up with batteries flat.
The festival MC hands us the spotlight. We take a breath, find a groove and go for it. Dirtmusic is appointed thirty-five minutes tonight. After we’ve finished the reaction is somehow ecstatic – and it seems to me it’s not just about playing music, but about playing it here, in this place, and what that means to people.
But its not all about the music – Race takes some time to reflect on his encounters with the locals:
Picture: Desjeux
A family – the nine-year-old home from school kicking a plastic bottle around in the dust, the mother and sisters coming back for lunch, the father walking home with a rifle rested on his shoulder. I ask the boy what his dad is hunting and he says, ‘lapins, rabbits …’ Visiting the festival is allowed but he has to be home by the 1 am curfew. So how does he tell the time? He glances briefly at the sky and smiles. This desert is his home; the sun and stars strike the hours.
In the same way, it’s impossible to be alone here. Sooner or later, somebody will appear. I walk out beyond the festival camp, beyond the camels and tents and fields of men observing Mecca, until there is nobody in sight and sit down under a shade tree. After ten minutes or so, two figures appear on the horizon coming from different directions on tangents that both converged on me. The two naturally shout out as they pass, ‘Ça va?‘
The Festival au Desert runs from tomorrow for three days and sounds like a great time – if you leave now you might just get there in time!!
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