Echoes of the Land: February 2007

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Interview with Mariza

Mariza, the striking, single-monikered singer who has become the international face of the traditional Portuguese song form called fado has broken a barrier or three in her career.

Born 33 years ago in Mozambique, of African and European background (her mother was from Mozambique, her father from Portugal and her full name is Mariza Reis Nunes), Mariza grew up in Lisbon's Mouraria-Alfama district whose clubs and taverns frequented by sailors, prostitutes, the children of slaves and working men and women were said to have been the 19th-century birthplace of fado.

It was there, as a precocious five-year-old, that she began to sing the slow, rhythmic, often melancholic songs, what some have called the Portuguese blues. Though steeped in the traditions and enamoured of the greatest fado singer of the 20th century, Amalia Rodriguez, when Mariza returned to singing fado in her early 20s, after a teenage flirtation with jazz and pop, she began to make small but significant changes to a style largely unchanged in 150 years.

With her closely cropped platinum blonde hair and a penchant for colourful necklaces, rather than the traditional black bun and severe black clothes, Mariza would have stood out anyway.

But when she added hints of Brazilian rhythms, jazz and, more recently, a full orchestra rather than only the Portuguese guitar as backing, the slender singer ran the risk of offending the purists even as she opened up fado to a generation more interested in rock and pop than the "old" music.

However, any opprobrium at home was quelled as soon as she opened her mouth to sing. A similar effect was obvious among fado novices as we discovered last year when Mariza was a success at the Sydney Festival.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

The 2007 edition of WOMAD in the UK announced the line-up for the festival. Baaba Maal (Senegal); Balkan Beat Box (Israel/USA); Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba (Mali); Ben Taylor (USA); Bill Cobham (USA); Candi Staton (USA); Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); CJ Chenier (USA); Daara J (Senegal); El Tanbura (Egypt); Kronos Quartet (USA); Kung Nai & Ouch Savy (Cambodia); Lila Downs (Mexico); Mariza (Portugal); Marzoug (Algeria); Sam Tshabalala (South Africa); Samba Mapangala & Orchestre Virunga (Kenya/Democratic Republic of Congo); Serta-Gesar Troupe (Tibet); Sheila Chandra (UK); Steel Pulse (UK); The Dhol Foundation (UK) The Imagined Village (UK); Toots & The Maytals (Jamaica); Toumast (Niger Republic); Warsaw Village Band (Poland)

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Womad New Zealand 2007 CD Released

The CD was released by Shock Records NZ through Border Music on Monday 12 February and features 16 tracks from some of the fantastic worldwide performers set to take to the stages at WOMAD New Zealand 2007 at New Plymouth's Brooklands Park and TSB Bowl from March 16-18.

The CD truly is a world music journey, beginning in Mali with a track from "the Golden Voice of Africa" Salif Keita, followed by sensational French/Swiss/Argentine tango act Gotan Project.

Next up is Kronos Quartet and Afrobeat superstar Femi Kuti from Nigeria, with tracks from New Caledonia's traditional Kanak performers Celenod, and the legendary Mahotella Queens from South Africa.

New Zealand's own Don McGlashan contributes a track, before the stunning sounds of Portugese fado singer Mariza, and Mexico's Lila Downs. Next up is Australia's Augie March, Chinese bamboo flautist Guo Yue and another Australian act, Lior.

The festival's incredible world tour continues - off to Israel for Yasmin Levy, and to Tuva for Huun Huur Tu, before coming back to New Zealand with a track from dDub and finishing with Indonesia's SambaSunda.

One Love - Johnny Clegg

South African musician Johnny Clegg, who's popularly known as the 'White Zulu,' has released a new solo album, featuring a song about Zimbabwe. The CD, called "One Love", features a track critical of President Robert Mugabe's administration. It's entitled "The Revolution will eat its children"

In the song, Clegg specifically denounces the political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe. In an interview with South Africa's Mail and Guardian Newspaper, Clegg states that the song is open criticism of Mugabe's government. In the interview, Clegg adds that while culture should never be used as a weapon because that would reduce cultural value, musicians and other performers have a duty to draw attention to injustice.

In addition, Clegg says "The Revolution Will Eat its Children" is about the "inability of certain African leaders to relinquish power, despite its being time to do so."

Monday, February 26, 2007

Interview with Johnny Clegg

Gazette: Your father took you into the townships when you were 9. What was it about that culture that you seemed to connect with at such a young age?

Clegg: It was more the way he connected with it. He was a crime reporter and he had connected with the most crazy, colourful groups of people in the underworld, but also connected to music, connected to key figures of the community, so he operated as a journalist, writing and interacting with these people. And he was also somebody who wanted to communicate that people were living these amazing lives in the townships. These lives were absolutely incredible - the intensity, the colour, the texture, the paradoxes, the inability to resolve conflicting loyalties. All of this stuff was communicated to me at the age of 7, 8, 9, 10. I became, I suppose, infected with the same passion and interest. It was about real people struggling to overcome real problems, real contradictions. And South Africa was such a contradictory society in the 60s. It was forcefully separated on the one hand, but on the other hand, people would meet at drinking houses, at clubs ...

The African population itself was going through a huge transformation from the rural, tribal world to the modern, urban Western world. And all of these fascinating paradoxes .... part of apartheid's huge negative image abroad was the government's attempt to stop urbanization. They didn't want black people in the cities. They wanted to have what they called feeder locations outside of the white areas. So a southwest township, which later became Soweto, was one of these big feeder populations, which were not supposed to be permanent. They were supposed to be returned...every 11 months, you had to go back to the rural area where you came, get a new labour contract and come back again to Johannesburg. The only problem is, you had people born in Soweto, who never, ever ... you had second and third generation Sowetans, and the government had to accept that this was now permanent dwellings, a permanent city.

These are all the contradictions and all the ironies that the country threw up, and (my father) was interested in that. And he was also a bit of a lunatic, because he would take me to places that were just ...I remember once going with him to...he was covering a feud between two groups in an African church. A young preacher had broken away from the main preacher. I have a very clear recollection of these two groups standing dressed in their Sunday best with rocks in their hands, ready to throw stones. And my dad put me into a police van while he went out to take photographs. And the police guy said to him, "Are you mad? How can you bring a 9-year-old kid?" And my dad was just a total newshound. He said "Don't worry, don't worry. You can sit him in the van. He's done this before. He knows what's going on. You do your job. I'll do my job. You're sitting in the police van. It's no big deal. I'm not going to take this kid back and lose the story." And he just talked his way through it. And I sat in a van and watched these events unfold and how the police went in and separated the groups and he got his story, he got his photographs - and, in a way, I felt like this curtain was always being moved away for me to see the other side of South Africa - by him. It was always this magic ... these moments. And then the curtain was closed because you'd go back into a white area, back into a white school, back into ... you know ... during the week. And so I think I always knew that there was another reality on the other side of town, which, I think, most white kids didn't know. And they didn't care.

Techarí - Ojos de Brujo

The latest recording by Ojos de Brujo, one of the hottest world music bands, provides more of their cutting edge sound. The Spanish band has found a successful formula that is attracting worldwide attention. The group combines flamenco beats with Catalan rumba, turntablism, hip hop and sounds from many other nations thanks to the participation of numerous high profile guests.

Interview with Vieux Farka Toure

When the footsteps you’re following in are as big as Ali Farka Toure’s - a guitarist and singer renowned as one of Africa’s greatest artists - you’re bound to encounter a few bumps along the way.
When it’s Toure’s son who’s doing the following - and against his father’s wishes - the bumps can seem like mountains.
Vieux Farka Toure, who makes his local debut Thursday at Johnny D’s, decided to do exactly what his father didn’t want him to do: pursue a life in music.
“As soon as I told my father that I wanted to enroll in Mali’s National Arts Institute in Bamako and become a musician, he came down very hard on me,” Toure said in an e-mail exchange that was translated from French. “He was completely against the idea, and reacted very openly and strongly against it: He stopped paying for my transportation, doing me favors where he used to without question, and so forth.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Interview with Vieux Farka Touré

It must be tough being the son or daughter of a famous musician, especially when you aspire to follow in their footsteps. Unfortunately for Vieux Farka Touré, he's the son of the late, great Ali Farka Touré, a veritable guitar hero of Malian desert blues music (and mayor of his home town, Niafunké), who died recently from cancer. But fortunately for him, he's a promising musician in his own right and has been creating quite a buzz with his self-titled, debut album.

When Ali Farka Touré passed away, he was fiercely proud of his 25-year-old son (one of 11 siblings), but it wasn't always the case. After many wrangles with record labels, Farka Touré senior had developed a huge distrust of the music business. It wasn't until he joined up with Nick Gold's World Circuit label that he felt he'd got a just deal, and so when his son showed signs of early musical talent (playing drums and calabash) he was understandably concerned, and tried to dissuade him.

"It was difficult," says Farka Touré, "but I persisted with my music cautiously and quietly, and eventually my father was convinced that my desires and passion were greater than his worries about my following him into that world."

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Fado Vadio

José de Oliveira bellows, occasionally off key, the melancholic songs known as fado.

But questionable talent does not inhibit the 70-year-old retired welder from taking over the floor at A Baiuca, a tiny tavern and restaurant, and keeping the two dozen diners captive — or perhaps prisoner — past midnight.

When he sings a well-known song of love, longing and loss, the diners put down their knives and forks and join in. When one couple dare to whisper during the song, a woman shushes them with the classic retort: “Silence! Fado is being sung.”

This is the ritual of fado, performed night after night with various degrees of authenticity, quality, kitsch and tourist appeal in the dinner clubs of Lisbon.

Reviled by some as backward-looking and morose, fado, which means fate, has been reinvented to become Portugal’s most successful cultural export. But here, in the twisting alleyways of Alfama, one of the working-class districts where fado was born, the songs are the classics, the message unadorned.

Mr. de Oliveira, dressed in a somber vest and trousers, his tie tightly knotted, is a neighborhood fixture.

“José doesn’t have a good voice, but he loves fado, he breathes fado,” said Henrique Gascon, the owner of A Baiuca. “Sometimes people cry when he sings.”

There is no stage, no microphone, no spotlight, not even candles here. It is the kind of place that hangs a “no smoking” sign on the door, then puts ashtrays on the tables. When Mr. de Oliveira’s voice cracks one time too many, João de Jesus, 33, owner of a fire extinguisher company, steps in to take his place.

Inspired, it is believed, by African slave and Moorish songs, fado was transformed by Portuguese sailors in the early 19th century into a vehicle to express the pain of loneliness and danger of a life at sea.

Interview with The Gotan Project

It's like a weird underground current. With no discernible publicity or public profile, somehow the grungy Brixton Academy in London has filled up with an eclectic crowd of thousands, a crowd that ranges from greying hi-fi boffins to the scarily young and pierced, to see a band occupying a niche for electronic tango. Months later, in Munich, that current only seems to have gathered force. Are there any tickets for the Gotan Project? Am I kidding? A German shrug. "We have been sold out six weeks now."

The three musical collaborators at the heart of the Gotan Project are almost as diverse as the crowd. Eduardo Makaroff, an Argentinian guitarist steeped in the traditions of tango, is a genial paterfamilias; Christoph H. Mueller, who is Swiss but met his fellow Gotans in the musical melting pot of Paris, is a casting agency's serious musical experimentalist; and French MC Philippe Cohen Solal, true to the spirit of rock'n'roll, doesn't emerge from his hotel room until the interview is almost over.

On stage, however, he manages to be a powerful presence even from his position at the back of the stage, standing at the keyboard behind a great gang of acoustic players, a piano and the lushly glamorous vocalist, Cristina Vilallonga. Suited and booted, as they all are, in white, he conducts his own beats with a flourish reminiscent of Kraftwerk in their most cabaret moments. The weave of sounds is infectious - Gotan is, apparently, the dance downloader's favourite - but it is also constantly surprising.

Ivan Lins

Brazilian superstar Ivan Lins occupies a strange twilight zone when he travels to the United States.

While he's never attained the level of recognition enjoyed here by his illustrious countrymen Caetano Veloso , Milton Nascimento , and Gilberto Gil , his music is much more firmly entrenched. Beloved by jazz musicians and embraced by pop icons, Lins has somehow flown under the American pop cultural radar, despite the fact that over the past quarter century, no living Brazilian composer's music has been more widely heard or recorded in the United States.

Nothing better captures the nature of his crossover appeal than the 2000 Telarc album celebrating his music, "A Love Affair, " and a related Carnegie Hall extravaganza the same year that featured a disparate cast including Sting, Chaka Khan, Grover Washington Jr., Dianne Reeves, and Vanessa Williams. A riveting performer himself with a smoky tenor, pure falsetto, and strongly jazz-influenced keyboard style, Lins opens a two-night run at the Regattabar on Thursday with his working quartet, featuring percussionist Teo Lima , bassist Nema Antunes, and keyboardist Marco Brito .

"Gil and Caetano, they go much more on the pop side, and they can reach a larger number of regular people," says Brazilian jazz guitarist Romero Lubambo , a frequent collaborator with Lins whose playing is featured throughout "A Love Affair."

"Ivan thinks about MPB," Lubambo continues, using the common initials for the stylistically diverse current of Brazilian pop music known as música popular brasileira . "But he composes with gorgeous harmonies and takes some different routes with chord sequences that you don't normally hear. The effect is incredible, and that makes it very suitable for jazz musicians."

Tinariwen - Aman Iman

There is a saying that it only takes one drop of water to make the glass overflow. Let’s hope that proves to be the case with Aman Iman (Water is Life), the third album from Tinariwen, the fabulous exponents of an intoxicating brand of desert blues.

Admired throughout their North African homeland and by world music fans, they are yet to make a major breakthrough in the West.

Tinariwen first emerged as musical standard bearers for a youth rebellion which swept the post-colonial states of North Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.

At the root of this revolt were the unemployment, poverty and social exclusion being suffered by the Berbers, the indigenous population of the region, who prefer to be called the Amazigh, or “free” peoples of North Africa.

Interview with Tinariwen

Hailing from the Touareg people, Tinariwen play the ‘music of the unemployed’. They spoke to Kevin Devine about their Aman Iman album

You have dedicated Aman Iman to “Peace, tolerance and development in the Sahara and the world of the oppressed.” These are powerful sentiments and I can guess where they’ve come from, but why did you choose this particular dedication?

I think it’s important for us to make it clear that the Tinariwen story isn’t just some exotic epic that happened in some obscure corner of the Sahara desert, and that is without any relevance to the wider world.

What happened to us has happened to millions of people around the world, and is still happening.

Our songs are about the Touareg, and our home in the desert. But we’d also like to think that anyone who’s in exile, who’s fighting for independence, for the survival of their people, their culture and their language, can relate to the songs too.

But having said that, we also believe in peace, tolerance and development. The rebellion we fought in the early 1990s was very painful and very brutal, especially in its effect on the civilian population.

War of any kind must always be engaged as a last resort, in self-defence. In those circumstances, no doubt the members of Tinariwen would fight again but in the meantime we place our faith and our hope in peace, tolerance and developement.

Tinariwen

It is the hour before sundown in the desert town of Kidal and Ibrahim Ag Alhabib - aka 'the ragamuffin kid', as his nickname translates from the Tamashek - is talking about his previous incarnation as a guerilla fighter. Is it true that during the Tuareg rebellion that started in 1990, he waged war against the Malian government with a Kalashnikov and a Stratocaster strapped across each shoulder? 'That's exactly what happened,' he says softly.
Ibrahim looks like Keith Richards's younger cousin and is the charismatic star of Tinariwen, the most thrilling act in world music right now. Their third album threatens to turn them into bona fide rock stars. But Ibrahim also waged war against the government from this outwardly inhospitable corner of eastern Mali.

The Tuareg are the descendants of tribesmen described by Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC and ran the trans-Saharan trade routes for more than two millennia. Known as the Blue People, because indigo dye in their shawls stained their skin, they kept black slaves, rode camels and were simultaneously feared across vast swathes of this part of Africa and mythologised in the West.

The rhetoric of rebellion is embedded in the DNA of rock music, and tales of Tinariwen's involvement in the Tuareg struggle for liberation - following independence for Niger, Mali, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso in the 1960s - have added to their own mystique. The truth is inevitably complex and to find it necessitates a bone-jarring journey to what is still rebel territory.

Friday, February 16, 2007

After more than 14,000 recordings and a career spanning six decades, legendary Bollywood singer Asha Bhosle still considers herself a student of music.

Born in 1933 in Goa, she has sung thousands of hits in several Indian languages, which have garnered her innumerable awards.

Bhosle gained global renown through world tours, concerts and performances with international artists such as Boy George, the Grammy-award winning Kronos Quartet and British band Cornershop, who paid tribute to her with their 1999 song "Brimful of Asha".

Recently she zoomed to the top of the Indian music charts with her album "Asha and Friends" featuring blonde Australian cricketer Brett Lee and macho Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt.

After losing her father at the age of 9, Bhosle started acting and singing in films with her more illustrious sister Lata Mangeshkar to support her family.

A failed first marriage did not deter her -- she brought up her three children as well as pursuing her singing career. She remarried famous Bollywood composer Rahul Dev Burman in 1980.

Bhosle's big break in Bollywood came in 1957 when she sung tracks for the film "Naya Daur" (New Age). Now 73, Bhosle has no plans of quitting the industry.

Soweto Gospel Choir - African Spirit

The third album from Soweto Gospel Choir is called "African Spirit," a title that's more than justified by such rollicking, soulful numbers as "Seteng Sediba." But the disc also includes a lot of Western crossover, which lessens the effect of the most exuberant material. Though it makes a certain sense to ransack the songbooks of Bob Marley ("One Love") and Jimmy Cliff ("Sitting in Limbo"), such Dylan songs as "Forever Young" are ill-suited to the group, and "World in Union" is closer to Broadway than Johannesburg. Most egregious is a version of U2's "One" in which the choir, comprising more than 30 voices, serves merely as a backup group for the ever-preening Bono.

Interview with Femi Kuti

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti. But, in the run-up to the annual "Fela-bration" in Lagos, his eldest son and chief musical heir is in no mood to reminisce. "There's so much in my father's life," says Femi Kuti. "Just his musical works you could listen to all year long. But I don't want to be derailed. I have it at the back of my mind, and I just use it as a strength to keep me grounded."

In the 1970s, Fela Kuti pioneered the exhilarating meld of horn-driven jazz, funk and west African highlife that took James Brown's soul beat "back to Africa". For more than 20 years he played to thousands in his famous Lagos club, the Shrine. But his politically inflected lyrics brought clashes with successive military regimes in Nigeria, including frequent beatings and jail. In one raid in 1977 on Fela's walled compound - his self-declared "republic of Kalakuta" - his mother died of her injuries after being thrown from a window by soldiers.

Femi Kuti rebuilt the New Afrika Shrine in 2000, after it was closed down the previous year following harassment from the landlord, and he plays three free concerts there a week. He also founded, in 1998, the student-based Movement Against Second Slavery (Mass) to push for social change. Although he has been less confrontational with the government than his father, his appearance to many as Fela's reincarnation has drawn attacks in the Nigerian press for "standing by my father's legacy".

African Soul Rebels

This is the third year of the African Soul Rebels tour - previous line-ups have included the Sahara Guitars of Tinariwen, Mali's Amadou & Mariam, Rachid & Taha & Souademassi from Algeria.

This time around you couldn't beat the line up with a stick. The "son of a lion" Fema Kuti is the headliner. Kuti's 16-strong band summon up a killer brew of Nigerian Afro-Beat, matching the energy and innovation of his father Fela Kuti. Guinean kora player Ba Cissoko, is a relative newcomer. His Electric Griot Land was a nod to Hendrix's 1968 double album, Electric Ladyland, to do for the kora and its West African repertoire what Jimi did for the Delta Blues. His cousin Sekou plays a Kora saturated with effects and veers from a skunk futurism to sounding like it has been amplified from a 1920s radio.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Ali Farka Toure & Vieux Farka Toure

Reviews of Ali Farka Toure's Savane and Vieux Farka Toure's first album Vieux Farka Toure.

One immediate response, when presented with these two albums—the first posthumous release by the extraordinary Malian guitarist and singer Ali Farka Toure, and the first ever release by his son, Vieux Farka Toure—might be to see in the albums the passing of the “desert blues” flame from one generation to the next. In a sense, of course, that is indeed what Savane and Vieux Farka Toure represent, for the transmission of tradition from father to son is established practice amongst West African musicians—and Ali duly anoints his son's debut with two cameo appearances, one of which is amongst the album's highlights.

Grammy World Music winners

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) announced the winners of the 49th Grammy Awards. Of interest to our world music fans, join us in congratulating the winners in the two world music categories.

Best Traditional World Music Album:
Soweto Gospel Choir, Blessed (Shanachie)

Best Contemporary World Music Album:
The Klezmatics, Wonder Wheel (Jewish Music Group)

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Ojos de Brujo in London

Towards the end of Ojos de Brujo's exhilarating two-hour show, the keyboardist, speed-rapper and translator DJ Panko told the non-Spanish half of the audience that the singer Marina had said something to the effect that "Tanguillo de Maria" "is very, very happy song for you". That could have applied to virtually any of the Barcelona band's relentless set. Many of their songs are overtly political, but the vibe is always up.

Marina, with her locks bound tight in an orange head-wrap, antique clothes and scarlet feather boa, looked like the Rastafarian offspring of Frida Kahlo. She ran around the stage, singing every song with the same throaty intensity.

Her melodies have a Spanish heart of darkness, but then an Arabic twist or Indian flourish lifts them to another level. She was flanked by two flamenco guitarists, a drummer, two percussionists and a bass player, plus any number of bit players, including a male flamenco dancer. The musicians gave the impression of racing each other to the end of each song, rather than simply playing it.

Tinariwen - Aman Iman

The phrase "Aman Iman", in the Tamashek language of the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara, means "Water is the soul", or "Water is life", and is often followed by "ach isoudar", meaning "and milk is survival". As such, it's an apt title for this latest album by Tinariwen, reflecting both the Tuareg's ongoing struggle for survival in one of the harshest environments, and the need for more nourishing fare - both physically and intellectually - required to survive in the wider world.

Until Tinariwen were discovered a few years ago and started touring outside Africa, it was rare for any Tuareg to travel outside theirhomeland; and their isolation and lack of education served them poorly during the long dispute with the Malian government, an almost secret war that has gone largely unreported. Tinariwen formed in the rebel training camps of Algeria and Libya in the early 1980s, whence they had fled following the government's crushing of a 1963 insurrection in which the parents of several members, including those of charismatic frontman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, were brutally slain. Several songs here date from that era, notably Ibrahim's lament "Soixante Trois" and Alhassane Ag Touhami's "Tamatant Tilay", a 1983 war cry urging the Tuareg into battle.

Rainforest World Music

The 10th edition of the Rainforest World Music Festival in Santubong, near Kuching, Sarawak, from July 13-15, promises to be a reunion to remember, and artistes are already being confirmed for this special anniversary event.

This year, there will be no new acts, with all artistes performing making return visits after having previously taken this annual festival by storm. Acts confirmed thus far hail from the four corners of the world and will eventually total some 20, organisers have revealed.

From Africa come Madagascar’s Tarika Be and Zimbabwe’s Black Umfolosi. Led by charismatic singer songwriter Hanitra Rosoanaivo, Tarika will surely be welcome, while Black Umfolosi makes an unprecedented third visit to the festival.

Tinariwen

The Tuareg tribesmen of the Sahara have a saying, something along the lines of "Patience comes from God, haste comes from the devil". I wish somebody had told our Tuareg driver. The adage, doubtless well-suited to life lived at camel's pace under the scorching sun, is rather less pertinent when you're tearing across the desert at upwards of 60mph in that latter-day ship of the desert, the Toyota Land Cruiser.

There is only one main road linking the populous southern part of Mali, around the capital Bamako, with our destination, way up in the north-east - and we left the road behind at Gao, on the Niger river. It's another 200 miles across desert scrubland littered with boulders and trees bearing spines the size of toothpicks, following the hundreds of criss-crossing vehicle tracks over what is aptly known as a piste, to Kidal, the home base of Tinariwen, the Tuareg band whose latest album Aman Iman (Water Is Life) has just been released to huge acclaim.

By the time we reach Kidal, the suspension on two of our four vehicles has broken, their sturdy iron bars snapping like twigs as we slough around in sand and bounce over rocks and potholes. Not for nothing do the Tuareg have another saying: "The desert rules you, you don't rule the desert." Frankly, you don't even get a vote.