The band that won the Grammy for Best World Music Album in 2012 began among young Tuareg men in exile, some of them fighters, playing electric guitars in the Sahara.
Tinariwen, whose name comes from the Tamasheq word for “deserts”, formed in the late 1970s among Tuareg exiles from Mali who had fled drought and conflict to Algeria and Libya. Their music, a hypnotic mix of Tuareg rhythms and electric guitar, became the sound of a people’s longing for home.
Ibrahim Ag Alhabib
The band grew around Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, a guitarist and songwriter whose father was killed during a Tuareg uprising in Mali in the 1960s when Ibrahim was a child. He built his first guitar from a tin can, a stick and bicycle wire. Later, after seeing a western film with a guitarist, he began playing and writing songs about exile, the desert and the Tuareg struggle.
Songs from the camps
In the 1980s, many young Tuareg men went to Libya, where some trained in camps linked to Muammar Gaddafi’s government. Tinariwen’s members were among them. Their songs, passed around on cassette tapes, spread among Tuareg communities across the Sahara and became associated with the Tuareg rebellion in Mali in the early 1990s.
After a peace agreement in the 1990s, the band’s members put down their weapons and focused on music.
International success
Tinariwen’s first international album, The Radio Tisdas Sessions, was released in 2001, and they began playing festivals in Europe, including the Festival au Désert in Mali. Western rock musicians became fans, and the band toured widely.
Their album Tassili, recorded in the desert of south-eastern Algeria with guests including members of the American bands TV on the Radio and Wilco’s Nels Cline, won the Grammy for Best World Music Album at the 2012 ceremony.
Conflict at home
In 2012, the same year as the Grammy, northern Mali fell into conflict as Tuareg separatists and then jihadist groups took control of large areas. Musicians were threatened, music was banned in some areas, and a member of Tinariwen was reportedly briefly abducted by militants. The band continued to record, sometimes outside Mali.
The legacy
Tinariwen opened the way for other Tuareg and Saharan artists, including Bombino from Niger and Mdou Moctar, who have built international careers with electric guitar music rooted in the desert. The “desert blues” genre, sometimes called assouf, the Tamasheq word for longing, is now recognised worldwide.
Their guitars were once passed around camps where young men prepared for war. They ended up on a Grammy stage, singing about the same desert.
