Music is Mali's most famous cultural asset and has shaped the country's history for centuries. A new book by Andy Morgan recounts how it has suffered under Islamist occupation.
Music is the glue that holds Mali together, the bridge that connects its past with its present, the ink with which its history is written. Without it, Mali as we know it would not exist.
For centuries, the role of the djeli or griot, a kind of storyteller-cum-singer-cum-poet, has been central to Malian society. In a predominantly oral culture, griots long fulfilled the role of historians. They recorded history through their songs and praises, and passed it down from one generation to the next. In pre-colonial times, every family had its own griot who recounted the family's past, its births and deaths, its relations with other families, and its connection to the legendary Emperor Sundiata Keïta, founder of the Malian Empire in the 13th century.
Griots are also to thank for perpetuation of the very structure of Malian society. Back in 1235, Sundiata defeated the Sosso king, Sumanguru Kanté, in the Battle of Krina, thus securing the rule of the Mandé people over a large part of West Africa. After the victory, an assembly of nobles set out to create a constitution that would organise the newly-established Mali Empire socially, politically and economically.
This constitution, known as the Kouroukan Fouga, can be seen as a type of West African Magna Carta and was the founding charter of the Malian Empire. It outlined how the government would rule, the rights of the population, and the laws according to which the people would live. It also codified social relations, dividing the population into different castes, each centred on a specific profession and identifiable by a certain surname - Keïtas, for example, were to be rulers, Diabatés griots, and Tourés marabouts (Islamic scholars).
It is through songs, epic poems and praises that the Kouroukan Fouga and the heroic story of Sundiata have been passed down orally by griots from generation to generation ever since. The laws of the land, the founding legend of the Malian Empire, and nature of relations between different groups were all recorded in musical and oral traditions, and formed the basis for the organisation of Malian society.
Visigoths and Wahabis
Today, Mali has one of the world's richest and most vivid music scenes, and it is not surprising that there was an outpouring of outrage and despair last year when the Islamist militants, who swept across the north of the country, banned music in the territories they held. The rebel groups have since been driven off by French forces and kept away by UN peacekeepers, but it was the Islamists' campaign against music that forms the backdrop to Andy Morgan's impressive new book Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali.
Morgan has long been involved in Mali's music scene, having helped organise the world famous Festival in the Desert and once managing the Tuareg band Tinariwen. And it is partly through intimate and personal experience that his book uses the lens of music and culture to examine human suffering under Islamist rule. In his writing, Morgan's own love of Malian music and culture comes across beautifully, and the tragic stories he tells - such the one of the Islamists' destruction of a musical archive in a Timbuktu radio station - leave the reader with an acute sense of loss themselves. Indeed, Morgan describes an attack on music as an attack on the soul, and recognises that observers around the world will be more touched when hearing about a man in Gao being "arrested and whipped for listening to a tape by Bob Marley or Salif Keïta," than a man facing the same fate for another reason. As Morgan puts it, an abuse such as this takes place not just on "the soul of some distant individual, but on the collective soul of humanity."
Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali starts by meandering through Malian history and touches upon topics as wide ranging as the Visigoth invasion of Spain in the fifth century to the origins of Wahhabism in Arabia in the eighteenth century. Later, he documents the thoughts and worries of Malian musicians alongside biographical sketches of the main protagonists in the recent conflict. However, despite this broad array of topics, the story never loses track of its central argument, which is that local cultures and traditions ought to play a key role in any country's development.
Morgan's long time involvement with the Malian music scene gave him unique access to some of the country's greatest stars such as Toumani Diabaté, Vieux Farka Touré and Bassekou Kouyaté as well the lesser-known up and coming artists of the more modern musical traditions. These offer a rich insight into the feelings of Mali's musicians themselves, and Amkoullel, a rapper, social activist and founder of the direct action collective Plus Jamais Ça! suggests why the Islamists may have wanted to ban music.
"When you destroy all the reference of a people, its memory, which is preserved in its museums, its monuments, its music and culture, well, then it's like they don't have a past any more, and you can replace it with what you're proposing," he says.
The third way
Morgan's book is an invaluable account of the recent conflict in Mali which puts a human face on the suffering of the Malian people at the hands of the Islamists. It places the everyday terror imposed upon the population in a well-researched historical and cultural framework and leaves the reader with a thorough understanding of how an ideology like Salafism, so alien to the open-minded Sufi-oriented traditions of West Africa, gained a foothold in northern Mali.
As Morgan makes clear, music has played an indispensable role in the history of Mali. Contemporary social relations are shaped by age-old stories that have been carried across the ages by the songs of the griots. Passed on from father to son and from mother to daughter, it is Mali's rich musical heritage that holds the true spirit of the nation.
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And now the Islamist militants who banned music have been pushed back, and Mali has held fresh elections following a coup, one can only hope that just as Sundiata Keïta's rise to power heralded the dawn of a new age of prosperity and plenty for the Malian people, the election of his namesake Ibrahim Boubakar Keïta 800 hundred years down the line will turn out to be a similarly auspicious event.
In the final chapter of his book, Morgan strikes home when suggesting the possibility of a 'third way' that leaves aside the false dichotomy between Western hedonism on the one hand, and Salafi puritanism on the other. This third way is open to democracy, education and development, and yes, even to sharia law, but only when firmly grounded in local culture and tradition. Music is bound to play a key role if this third way is to become reality.
You can read an online version of Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali here.
Joris Leverink is a freelance writer with a background in political economy and cultural anthropology. He has recently finished an MSc at SOAS in London, where he specialised in the history of the Malian political crisis. He is also an editor for the revolutionary online magazine ROARmag.org. You can contact him via Twitter @Jorislever
