On DVD - Rod Bishop reports on MALI BLUES (Lutz Gregor, Mali/Germany, 2016)

Some believe Mali, and particularly Timbuktu, to be the birthplace of the blues. Mali Blues (2016) is the third significant account of the civil war in Northern Mali to appear in recent years.

A conflict that started in 2012 as a liberation movement of the Tuareg peoples, it was quickly taken over by jihadists including a splinter al-Qaeda group who imposed strict Sharia law, particularly in the northern cities of Timbuktu, Kidal and Gao. Driven out of the cities a year later by forces led by the French military, the jihadists still roam across Northern Mali attacking troops and attempting to impose their version of Sharia law on locals.

Abderrahmane Sissako’s Cannes winner Timbuktu (2015), told the story of a cattle herder, his wife and their children as they became subjected to the absurd court judgements handed down by the jihadists who had overrun that fabled city.

Charlie English’s The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, published in 2016, is a page-turning account of the archivists and librarians who fought to save tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts (many of them in private hands) from the al-Qaeda fanatics out to burn them.

And now Mali Blues (2016) bears witness to the jihadists’ attempts to ban Mali’s renowned musical culture, internationally known for performers Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré, Tinariwen and Oumou Sangare among others.

Mali Blues follows four performers – the Tuareg guitarist Ahmed Ag Kaedi, forced to leave his home town of Kidal in the north when the jihadists burnt his equipment and threatened to cut his fingers off; singer-songwriter-guitarist Fatoumata Diawara who also acted in Sissako’s Timbuktu; a streetwise rap singer Master Soumy; and the “praise” singer Bassékou Kouyaté who, among other things, shows off a ngoni, an instrument he claims evolved into the banjo.

Filmed mostly in the capital Bamako, Gregor leans heavily towards political and cultural material. Two musical sequences stand out. Fatoumata Diawara (who played six concerts in NSW in 2012) returns to her village to sing a song to the women about genital mutilation. Their subsequent discussion on the issue is both powerful and illuminating.

They told me they do it in the morning

They do it with a piece of iron

With a knife

Illness is on the knife

Death is on the knife

Pain is on the knife

Terrible sickness is on the knife

They cut it off

They cut the blossom off

That made me into a woman

Don’t cut it off Mama

The blossom that made us into women

They cut it off me

And Master Soumy, who delivers an arresting rap about the plight of his religion:

Some spend their day happy and having fun and laughing

But in Gao people live in fear

What did they do to God?

Some are joyful and dance

But in Timbuktu peoples guts are tied in knots

….

You who torture people

Explain your Islam!

….

They make ruins of homes

Courtyards into holed calabashes

They say they fight for God

But their pact is with Satan

I’m shocked and disgusted

My body hurts up north

Kalashnikovs and bombs

Explain your Islam!

Torture, rape, thrashings

Explain your Islam!

Abuse and killings

Explain your Islam!