PhilPaine.com

Some­thing made me think of Tim­buk­tu, today. For a moment, I could smell the wind-blown sand, the aca­cias, the dry­ing dung. For a moment I could hear snort­ing camels, the rapid­fire street-talk in Chi­i­ni, the wail­ing muezin, the gri­ots play­ing gurkels and koras, the slen­der Fulani traders walk­ing like gods through the mar­ket place, jaun­ty in their con­i­cal hats. Fabled Tombouc­tou, the name itself has come to mean “far away and unreach­able”. Sad Tim­buk­tu, the fad­ing shad­ow of an ancient great­ness.…“Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, but the wealth of wis­dom comes from Tim­buk­tu.” Few can now read the man­u­scripts from its cen­turies-old libraries, and the chil­dren who tum­ble out of the Lycée may not care about their loss. Out­side the city, the mon­strous sand dunes march south­ward, threat­en­ing to swal­low what’s left of the city, like so many oth­ers that have sunk and drowned and van­ished into the sand sea. Years of war among the desert nomads, end­ed only by uneasy truce in the late nineties, did not do it any good. Nor did decades of exploita­tion and bru­tal­i­ty by a par­a­sitic Marx­ist aris­toc­ra­cy, before that. 

Why do mem­o­ries come flood­ing so strong­ly? Because I hear from the BBC that Ali Far­ka Touré has died of can­cer. Touré is Tim­buk­tu’s most famous mod­ern son, one of the great musi­cians of the world. Though raised in the tra­di­tion of clas­si­cal Malian music, he learned to play the gui­tar at the age of six, and sub­se­quent­ly absorbed the influ­ences of Amer­i­can blues­men like Big Joe Williams, John Lee Hook­er, and Light­nin’ Hop­kins. Even Hen­drix. With tremen­dous artistry and panache, he fold­ed these way­ward musi­cal descen­dants of Mali back into their ances­tral core, pro­duc­ing a high­ly per­son­al kind of blues that is best described as “serene”. Blues with­out suf­fer­ing or self-pity.

He was the last and only sur­viv­ing of ten sons, from a small vil­lage on the Niger. His par­ents nick­named him Far­ka (don­key) because of his stub­born­ness. His fam­i­ly mixed the uneasy eth­nic fac­tions of the region, and he took care to sing and record in Song­hai, Temazhek, and Ful­fulbe even at the time when the speak­ers of these lan­guages where at war. He was a humane and sen­si­tive man, as well as a great musi­cian. He did not fol­low the well-worn path to suc­cess and com­fort in Lon­don and Paris that has lured so many African stars. Instead, he stayed in Mali through hard times, and end­ed as may­or of a small town, hop­ing that he could use his fame to bring some good to peo­ple on a vis­i­ble, human scale.

So tonight, I’m play­ing through his albums, and let­ting the sights and sounds and smells blow over me, like the hot sands in the har­matan wind.

Why am I sit­ting in an apart­ment, my legs and wrists cramped from tedious­ly fill­ing out Excel tables, lick­ing my wounds from crap­py, vicious human beings, when I could be in the Sahara again? I could be. I’m in bad shape, flab­by, worn down by frus­tra­tion and betray­als. But I could go back if I worked up the nerve.