Nomadic Blues

The twisting, artful riffs and warm beats which saturate Bombino’s music mirror the Sahara, the ancestral home of the Tuareg people. Bombino, or Omara Moctar, borrows his serpentine chords from traditional Tuareg music, and the trotting rhythms of many of his songs have been said to echo the irregular metre of a camel’s tread. He told the New York Times in 2018 that “music [in the desert] carries a power with it, so you get the feeling when you’re holding an instrument in your hand and playing it, that you’re completing a picture that was otherwise incomplete.” Born in 1980 in Tidene, Niger, Moctar grew up with his sixteen siblings as a member of the Kel Air Tuareg federation, a nomadic people of the Sahara. He began composing many of his songs in the immense open space of the desert as a shepherd in the mid-1990s, calling it in his song ‘Tenere (The Desert, My Home)’ the “most beautiful space and the hardest space for life”.

Despite the 39-year-old’s growing success in the Western world — he was recently the first Nigerien to have been nominated for a Grammy award — Bombino told his label, Partisan Records, that he aims to “always get closer to Africa” with his music. In fact, his approach to guitar-playing is so far from Western tradition that he does not know any scales, having taught himself to play the guitar while staying with his cousins as a refugee in Algeria when he was a boy. His access to Western music was limited, and he learned the guitar by listening to pirated cassettes of Jimi Hendrix and Dire Straits — although he often did not know what he was hearing, “by the time a cassette makes it to the desert of Agadez, the writing is all rubbed off.”

Traditional Tuareg music remains in any case a significant influence. Using rhythms and vocal styles similar to Iberian and Arab music, traditional Tuareg music combines this with West African call-and-response-style singing. Among the instruments played are the Imzhad, a string instrument resembling a violin, and the Tabl, a cylindrical double-sided drum. Bombino combines the use of these folk instruments with the intricate guitar riffs that he taught himself from Western cassettes. His contemporary and raw take on traditional Tuareg music has won him global recognition and, as a result, Moctar has become known as the ‘Sultan of Shred’.

In the past, the Tuareg have had to rebel against colonialism and the imposition of rigid Islamic rule — something which the Tuareg’s soft Sufism does not allow for — and the Tuareg in Niger have always struggled for recognition, having been marginalised by the government. Tensions have arisen in part due to a lack of natural resources in the Agadez region, which experiences terrible droughts about once every ten years, and in part due to institutional flaws. As a minority group, there has only ever been one Tuareg Prime Minister in Niger, Brigi Rafini, appointed in 2011: and so, the Tuareg people’s livelihood is injured not only by the persistent droughts, but also by feelings of exclusion.

Bombino explores this marginalisation in many of his songs: in ‘Azamane (My Brothers United)’, from his album ‘Agadez’ (2011), he sings “Our community needs help/We are suffering and we have to stand up for our rights/We have to fight against injustice and discrimination.” Tuareg nationalism is rooted, at its core, in the concept of freedom, of liberating the Tuareg people and their territory from a government that they regard as foreign. Because of this ostracism, Bombino’s generation has experienced many sporadic, violent periods of rebellion: in 1990, 2007 and 2012.

Bombino was forced to flee to Tamanrasset in Algeria during the first Tuareg Rebellion of 1990, at the age of ten. During this time, rebels used concerts to recruit protesters, and Tuareg music came to be considered rebel propaganda, with music made by the Malian band Tinariwen serving as a medium for the distribution of coded messages among the Tuareg. Other musicians such as Abreyboun of Tinariwen, Keddo and Intayaden made music that declared the heritage and rights of the Tuaregs. Soon, this style was given a name, ‘ishoumar’, coming from the French ‘chômeur’ or ‘unemployed person’. Following the signing of a peace treaty by the government of Niger with the Tuareg rebels in 1995, Bombino could finally return to his home.

But following this peace treaty the situation hardly bettered itself, and it was not long until a second rebellion broke out in 2007. The wounds of Mamadou Tandja’s government were still fresh from the first rebellion, and so in order to hinder the uprising, the government banned guitars and violently suppressed the distribution of music. Two of Bombino’s band-mates, Sifi Allousseini and Adi Mohamed, were executed by the Nigerien army. Bombino was forced to flee once more, this time to Ouagadougou. During his three years in exile, he composed many of the songs for his 2011 album ‘Agadez’: “We have lost many men for our rights but there are no benefits for us at the end/It is necessary to find another solution”.

Bombino’s fight for Tuareg recognition manifests itself not only in his music, which is written exclusively in Tamasheq, one of the languages of the Tuareg people, but also in his performances, during which he dresses only in traditional garments such as a tagelmust, the traditional Tuareg head wrap. Much of his music is written to pay homage to the Tuareg people’s troubled past. Music in the Agadez region transcends just expression and is used as a form of communication to connect tribes across the vast, empty desert. ‘Imuhar’, a song from Bombino’s album ‘Nomad’, produced in part by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, translates as ‘Freemen’, and contains lyrics such as “Yofa anikir”, or, “Straighten up, my people”. Moctar said in an interview with Music Matters in 2013 that he never saw his guitar as a gun, but rather “as a hammer with which to build the house of the Tuareg people.” His intentions are not to encourage rebellion, but instead to inspire joy and pride in the Tuareg people, something which is difficult to achieve given the lack of defined borders and therefore the lack of defined national identity.

Indeed, many of Moctar’s songs pay tribute to Tuareg culture, as songs which express pride rather than lament at their difficult history. His song ‘Deran Deran Alkheir (Well Wishes)’, for example, is a tribute to traditional Tuareg wedding songs, with recorded claps and chants mixing with the rapid, powerful drums to conceive what is clearly a heartfelt, joyful song of celebration. By representing more than just the tragic aspects of Tuareg history, Bombino celebrates the richness and beauty of his culture, something which is often lost in the almost exclusively solemn narrative that surrounds the Tuareg in Western media, which only reports on rebellion and violence. Currently touring the USA, Bombino strives to spread recognition around the globe for the Tuareg people. “I want to create a bridge around the world through my music for people to cross and discover the Tuareg culture,” Bombino says, “they see our clothes on stage and hear the Tamasheq language, and I am sure that many become curious to learn more, and maybe even to visit the Sahara.”

Despite being twice a refugee, Bombino’s music attempts to heal and rouse the Tuareg people rather than incite them to violence: “Ayitma/Wadagh nihane”, “Wake up, my people/A long road awaits you”. Instead of using violence to stay Tuareg and proud, Bombino uses music as his form of rebellion, employing his guitar as a political statement for the whole world to see: “I never saw the need to take up arms for the rebel cause, I always believed that there was a path out through music.”

You can listen to his ‘Mahegagh (What Shall I Do)’ here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaqScs7vR-4