Educational Media Reviews Online

The music of Mali in western Africa is considered by most the direct ancestor of American blues, with its strong guitar-like leads and emotional singing. Recent years have brought great change to Mali, with Islamic fundamentalists bent on destroying secular culture, including Malian music. This film updates the situation from Festival in the Desert films. It moves back and forth between the personal, the political, and their overlap. Stage performances balance against rehearsals against the clubs and street against village life, the traditional contrasts with the modern.

The film opens with Bassekou Kouyaté, onstage in traditional clothing and closely-cropped hair, carrying a traditional central African stringed ngoni, electrified to be the local equivalent of an electric guitar. Speaking directly to the crowd, he says, "Now we will sing for peace. Only for peace." One at a time, he calls three other young musicians up to the stage, each enthusiastically welcomed by the crowd. This is not the Festival du Desert, formerly held annually, but its successor, the Festival sur le Niger de Ségou, in the more urbanized southern part of Mali, founded to support peace.

Each musician’s story is told in brief before the film returns to the festival. In individual interviews musicians talk about the effect that jihadis takeovers have on them, the people and the country, and the role of music and song in their lives. Besides Kouyaté, there is Fatoumata Diawara; Master Soumy, Islamic rapper; and Ahmed Ag Kaedi, Tuareg guitarist. Diawara, a female singer, speaks of returning home, her need to create and perform music, and of missing the deserts. She sings against female genital mutilation in her home village. Kaedi sits near the river, amplifier at his side, trying out various phrases, nodding to himself, as boys play close by. He describes fleeing the north of Mali as "jihadis" arrived, pursuing him as a musician. Bamako is a "prison" to him, compared to the freedom of the desert. Master Soumy, with white robe and pants and black pork pie hat, raps very political lyrics, aimed at the Islamic fundamentalists and the Malian president.

Malian musicians have become activists for "peace, a tolerant Islam and change in their country." This film treads the territory among past, present, and future, with everyday scenes and extraordinary celebration, night and day, interior and exterior, personal and political, work and play. The future of Mali is uncertain, but these musicians blaze a trail to reconciliation.