Conflict fails to silence Mali’s music

Crisis hurting music scene in country

BAMAKO, Feb 25, (AFP): The neonlit dance floor at Tiken Jah Fakoly’s club is empty for a Friday night, but a few determined dozens have braved a state of emergency, security checkpoints and the fear of an ongoing war to come sway to Mali’s legendary music.

The headliner and only act tonight at the Ivory Coast-born reggae star’s Radio Libre nightclub is Ami Kouyate, an up-and-coming singer from a renowned family of griots — the musicians, poets and storytellers who are the keepers of west Africa’s oral history.

Some 1,000 kms (620 miles) northeast of this night oasis in Bamako, the Malian capital, is the edge of a combat zone where French-led troops are fighting al-Qaeda-linked rebels who seized control of northern Mali last year and have now launched a campaign of suicide bombings and guerrilla attacks.

Voice

The conflict seems far away as Kouyate’s emotive voice washes over the audience and the drummer’s hands blur in the stage lights, the rapid-fire staccato of his djembe punctuating the slow chords of two electric guitars and an ngoni, or stringed calabash, in the polyrhythmic style for which Mali is famous.

But the 40-odd people in the room are a meagre crowd for Radio Libre.

“Since the crisis started not many people come here. People are afraid to go out,” says Djeneba Kouyate, the singer’s sister, who has come with about a dozen friends.

Fakoly, an icon of African reggae famous for his politically charged songs, says the crisis is hurting the music scene in a country known as the cradle of the blues.

“When there’s no crisis in Mali, at 11:00 pm, midnight on a Friday night, there are lots of people. But now there’s practically no one,” he tells AFP behind the double layer of leather-padded doors that insulate his private recording studio from the sounds of the club upstairs.

“But this is better than before. Since the intervention in the north, people are starting to go out. There was a time when we had to close completely because no one was coming.”

Getting to the club from downtown Bamako means spending half an hour sitting in a long line of cars at a security checkpoint where police with AK47s check drivers’ papers and look in the boots of their cars, a bid to stop the string of suicide bombings that have shaken the northeast from spreading to Bamako.