Timbuktu

Gotta see this film.

Malian music: Tinariwen on NPR

A "Tiny Desk Concert" from 2012.

Some Malian Tuareg music over at NPR

I don't know how long this music from Tinariwen will be available, but there is quite a bit of their recent release at this NPR site.

Better -- and authoritative -- news from Tiimbuctu

Excerpt of a statement from the international scholarly  organization most concerned with manuscript preservation:

From Tombouctou Manuscripts Project
(http://www.tombouctoumanuscripts.org)
Huma (Institute for humanities in Africa)
University of Cape Town

Since the start of this week there are reports about the destruction of library buildings and book collections in Timbuktu. It sounds as if the written heritage of the town went up in flames. According to our information this is not the case at all. The custodians of the libraries worked quietly throughout the rebel occupation of Timbuktu to ensure the safety of their materials. A limited number of items have been damaged or stolen, the infrastructure neglected and furnishings in the Ahmad Baba Institute library looted but from all our local sources – all  intimately connected with the public and private collections in the town - there was no malicious destruction of any library or collection.

There is much more detail in the full statement.

Mali -- a peaceful scene on the River Niger

From the Big Picture.  Click to make it big.

The uncertain fate of Timbuktu's manuscripts

http://world.time.com/2013/01/28/mali-timbuktu-locals-saved-some-of-their-citys-ancient-manuscripts-from-islamists/

The original report was much worse, saying that tens  of thousands of the most historic manuscripts had been burned by retreating Islamist rebels.  We'll see.

The threat to Malian music – and everything else worthwhile

From the Independent:

The image of Mali has long been a gentle one. It is a land of magical music and mouth-watering mangoes, of mud mosques and medieval manuscripts. A country dripping with history and culture that was slowly forcing its way on to the tourist map for Western visitors. Now, following the intervention of French warplanes nine days ago, it will be more associated in most people's minds with Islamic militancy.

This is a tragic twist for a people whose faith revolves around the more tolerant strands of Sufism. For all its poverty, Mali has traditionally been open to outsiders. It is a nation where women are prominent and musicians more closely entwined with everyday life than perhaps any other place on earth. Music has long been part of the social and political fabric, from praise singers who, for centuries, passed on the oral history to the state-funded bands used to bond the nation after independence.

When I first went there almost a decade ago, it was for the famous Festival in the Desert, some 50 miles from Timbuktu and a symbol of reconciliation after a previous Tuareg uprising. It took three days to get there; Westerners reaching the event were treated like old friends. Days were spent sheltering from fierce sun in tents, chatting over cups of sweet tea and biscuits. At night, those amazing musicians who have taken Malian music around the globe performed in front of turbaned tribesmen on camels while burning braziers lit up the desert. An unforgettable experience.

Where once there was music and dancing, today there is misery and deprivation

More here.

Tuareg music

The group Tinariwen performing in 2006.

AlJazeera's "The Stream" interviews various observers of the Malian scene

Here it is.

Phil Paine on bad news from Timbuktu

Phil reports:

I have a personal interest in Timbuktu (see blog for Mar 7, 2006), so I have followed, as best as I can, the recent events in Mali that affect it.  After the fall of Gaddafi’s regime, several hundred young Tuareg who had been serving as mercenaries in his army have returned to Niger and Mali. Along with them came a large stock of weapons.  This re-ignited the low-level civil war which had come to an apparently satisfactory peace settlement in 2009.  Disatisfaction with the response to this renewal of violence seems to have triggered a coup d’état by the country’s military against the democratically elected government. As a consequence of the instability following the coup, the “National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad” (MNLA) quickly occupied the three largest northern towns (Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal) and declared an independent state of Azawad, cleaving away the thinly populated northern half of Mali.

Few events in the last few years have depressed me as much. Mali had lifted itself by its bootstraps from an intensely repressive Marxist dictatorship, heavily involved in the slave trade, to become West Africa’s most promising democracy. Now that promise is evaporating.

More here: http://www.philpaine.com/?p=4439