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ly Paris. I am a technician by profession – a sound engineer. Though my first job was as a chauffeur and pinassier [land and water pilot]. I got my first wage packet in October 1957. I continued like that until 1971 when I was transferred to Bamako as a radio operator. Finally in 1980 I left to come home, as I could get at home what I couldn’t get anywhere else. I found some land and some cattle, and I’d still like to work on the land, which I couldn’t do when I was young.”


“I started recording for the French man in 1976 and made six albums between then and 1985, but without knowing it I was made a fool of. If I think of all the exhaustion that I’ve undergone to make those records and then come out of it all with egg on my face, it makes me feel sad. He has been very well looked after out of all this – he’s done very well. If I could see him today I’d change his skin into drops of water, cut his throat and make mincemeat of him. But now he’s doing fine in a coun- try where I can’t reach him. If he came to Africa he’d be eaten alive, in broad day- light! I’ve been abused and used in order to give them material wealth. It’s the mafia, the world of the mafia.”


D


idn’t they pay him? “Nothing. It was a trick played on me. I’m patient, I’m kind, but I can be worse than dynamite, and I’m not alone. There are


thousands of Africans like me. We say that when you get into something you do it properly and when you leave, you leave cleanly. It’s possible that this is the limit of my music and then I will stop and hang my guitar on the wall. The dreams I had are all gone down the chute, I wash my hands of it all. Sure and certain. What else do you want to ask me?”


I say that everybody here notices that his music has a resemblance to the blues, particularly the music of John Lee Hooker. Who were the influences on his music – did he get a lot from Hooker?


“John Lee Hooker is an artist I’ve loved a lot. But his music is African. We have some ethnic groups here in Africa and I think many black Americans come from them – that’s history! I don’t want to be too specific, but we have the Tamasheks who come from nowhere else but Mali, in particular the area around Timbuktu and a little on the Niger, from Tawa to Agadez. If you see them you’ll be convinced that the blues comes from this country.”


Are they related to the Tuaregs? “The Tuaregs are different. They are


white. The Tamasheks are black like us. It’s a tribe that sprang from the Mikti part of the Sahara to the Niger part – real desert, where if you put a gourd of water out at night, it is ice in the morning. If you listen to how the monocorde is played there, you’d think it was an American group. It’s a music I’ve tried to master.”


“I listened to John Lee Hooker’s records in the 1960s; the first time was with a friend who was a student. He came with records by John Lee Hooker, Albert King and Otis Redding. He was from the Kouyate family, a child with griot roots. I said to him, ‘Listen, this is music that has


Photo: Dave Peabody


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