The Tuareg have had their fair share of struggle for a better recognition of their rights and culture, a conflict that officially ended in Mali 1992 and Niger in 1995.

In the continuity of this struggle, several bands of Tuareg music, also known as Ishumar, were formed. The first one was Tinariwen. These bands take up traditional melodic patterns to which are often added more politically involved lyrics on their lifestyle and the call for youth mobilization.

Toumast was created in the 90s by Moussa Ag Keyna. After years of fighting and resistance, he was severely injured and evacuated to France. With Aminatou Goumar, he recorded a first album and then a second evolving around normal life, love, exile, Tuareg struggle and disillusion.

This summer we’ll be introducing a few of these songs, sung solo by Moussa Ag Keyna on guitar. The first one, called « The Hawk », is about the nostalgia of life in the desert…

Listen to another song in Tamasheq: Tallyatt Idaght (“This girl”)

Listen to another song in Tamasheq: Kik Ayittma (“Hey Brothers!”)

Watch all the videos in Tamasheq

Image & sound: Arnaud Contreras
Translation: Moussa Ag Keyna
Editing: Caroline Laurent

More on Toumast: Official website, Facebook, Myspace, Real World Records.

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A few pictures

Reminder: Tamasheq (or Tamajeq, or Tamaheq, stemming from the word Tamazight) is spoken by the Tuareg, a nomadic people that has been settled in the desert areas of North Africa for millennia, over a vast territory reaching from Mali to Libya, from Burkina Faso to Algeria, and including Niger. There are around one million speakers of Tamasheq.

Like Kabyle, Shawia, or Rifian, Tamasheq is in fact a variant of Berber (or Tamazight), a group of languages that covers the whole of North Africa (Marocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, and Burkina Faso), not to mention a large diaspora in Europe and America. Total estimations account for over 45 million speakers of Berber languages.

One distinctive feature of the Berber language is its writing. An alphabet known as Tifinagh appeared during the first millennium B.C., and despite its disappearing in most of the North where it was replaced by Roman and Arabic alphabets, the Tuareg have been using it ever since. In the second half of the 20th century, a modern version, first created by the Berber Academy and then modified by linguists to reach a standard form that would be suitable to all the idioms, is now widely used in the North and was even formalized in Morocco in 2001. This Alphabet, known as Neo-Tifinagh, while raising enthusiasm in the North, still encounters reluctance among the Tuareg people.