Sahara

In the news recently, Mali, one of the countries of the Sahara. Islamic fanatics held Timbuktu, and burned ancient manuscripts.
The Touareg, nomadic peoples of the Sahara, are resisting the takeover of their traditional lands. I posted this Touareg band, Tinariwen, a few years ago.

"Tinariwen was founded by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who at age four witnessed the execution of his father (a Tuareg rebel) during a 1963 uprising in Mali. As a child he saw a western film in which a cowboy played a guitar. Ag Alhabib built his own guitar out of a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire. He started to play old Tuareg and modern Arabic pop tunes.^{[citation needed]} Ag Alhabib first lived in Algeria in refugee camps near Bordj Badji Mokhtar and in the deserts around the southern city of Tamanrasset, where he received his first acoustic guitar from a local Arab man.  Later, he resided with other Tuareg exiles in Libya and Algeria.
In the late 1970s Ag Alhabib joined with other musicians in the Tuareg rebel community, exploring the radical chaabi protest music of Moroccan groups like Nass El Ghiwane and Jil Jilala; Algerian pop rai; and western rock and pop artists like Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, Carlos Santana, Dire Straits, Jimi Hendrix, Boney M, and Bob Marley. Ag Alhabib formed a group with Inteyeden Ag Ablil, his brother Liya, Ag Ablil, and Hassan Ag Touhami in Tamanrasset, Algeria to play at parties and weddings.^[9] They acquired their first real acoustic guitar in 1979. While the group had no official name, people began to call them Kel Tinariwen, which in the Tamashek language translates as "The People of the Deserts" or "The Desert Boys."
In 1980, Libyan ruler Muammar al-Gaddafi put out a decree inviting all young Tuareg men who were living illegally in Libya to receive full military training. Gaddafi dreamed of forming a Saharan regiment, made up of the best young Tuareg fighters, to further his territorial ambitions in Chad, Niger, and elsewhere. Ag Alhabib and his bandmates answered the call and received nine months of training. They answered a similar call in 1985, this time by leaders of the Tuareg rebel movement in Libya, and met fellow musicians Keddou Ag Ossade, Mohammed Ag Itlale (aka "Japonais"), Sweiloum, Abouhadid, and Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni. All sang and played guitar in various permutations. The musicians joined together in a collective (now known as Tinariwen) in order to create songs about the issues facing the Tuareg people, built a makeshift studio, and vowed to record music for free for anyone who supplied a blank cassette tape. The resulting homemade cassettes were traded widely throughout the Sahara region.
In 1989, the collective left Libya and moved to Ag Alhabib's home country of Mali, where he returned to his home village of Tessalit for the first time in 26 years. In 1990 the Tuareg people of Mali revolted against the government, with some members of Tinariwen participating as rebel fighters. After a peace agreement known as the Tamanrasset Accords was reached in January 1991, the musicians left the military and devoted themselves to music full-time. In 1992 some of the members of Tinariwen went to Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire to record a cassette at JBZ studios. They played occasional gigs for far-flung Tuareg communities throughout the Sahara region, gaining word-of-mouth popularity among the Tuareg people."
 (Wikipedia)




More from Mali, Ali  Farka Toure, and Toumani Diabate.
Trust me, I know they're funny names, and a language you don't understand, but give it a chance.

Building the Desert.

Damn. Another childhood myth exploded, I always believed in giant cactuses, but now the truth has been revealed.

Oops!

 

I Have No Idea Whatsoever of How to Caption This.

 

Self-Scrolling Snow-Blanket

 

My Great-Great Grandfather's Forge

I can't name any of them. I think my sister can...
The boxes of tools on the floor, modern-day shoeing smiths still use the same pattern.

 Great-Uncle Percy.

In this picture, he's forge-welding a wheel-rim. By hammering the red-hot overlapping joint, he'll cause the steel to flow together, to weld with no visible seam. I liked Percy, only met him a few times. There was a family feud, following my great-great grandfather's death, Percy and his brother and two sisters disagreed about the meaning of the wording of the will. It went to the local court, to the county court, then the high court, and eventually to parliament.
So Percy was estranged from his family, he moved away, to the far side of the country, but my father always kept in touch, and, when the protagonists were all in their eighties, my father decided enough was enough. He persuaded Percy to come and stay with us. Then, one day, they went out for a ride in the car, and my father steered toward Hobberley Cottage, Percy's childhood home.
Dad  knocked on the front door. My great-aunt Sybil came to the door, wiping her hands on her apron, the house full of the scents of baking.
She stood, I am told, mouth open, looking at the tall, grey-haired  old man in her doorway, then "Come in, our Percy".

My dad left them.
Great Uncle Walter was in the orchard. "Walter," my dad said "You'd best go in, you have a visitor."
The feud was over.
Regrets over lost years, tears, and a lot of catching up. The following day, Percy was helping Walter repair the shed, Sybil was cooking her mother's fruit-cake recipe, and they were a family at peace once more.

House-Clearing and Old Photographs.

My mother's house, after a year and a half on the market, now has a buyer, there's been a significant drop in price from the original valuation, but the sale's going through. Which means I've been immersed again in minutiae, sorting through all the stuff which escaped the earlier culls, the trips to the dump, the apportioning among siblings. 

With  the aid of my sister, I've been delving deep into boxes of papers, and I keep finding photographs. All too often, there's nothing written on the back, no clue. I recognise a few faces from other pictures in annotated albums, but some? Some are recognisably family faces, but I'm not sure just who. 

These two, above, who are they? I love the picture, it looks like a posed scene from a movie, mother and daughter, an old dog who'd rather be somewhere else, I think I know the house, I think I used to go there as a child, my sister thought so too, we both remember clambering on hay-bales in a dusty barn, but we think we were just toddlers? Sharlston?

"Dorothy, Sybil, Mary, Fanny.

I remember great aunt Fanny. An aunt by marriage.  Long gone.

Lydia

I think I drive past these houses every night, but who? No idea.

 

Blanche, holding my father, in 1918.

Blanche worked on my grandfather's farm, was still living in the village in the sixties.

 

The boy with the cap is my dad, in 1931, the man is Dick Snowden (who? no idea)... outside my grandparents' farm, Old Hall.

 

 On the bottom left, 'Betty'. She and her parents and younger brother are visiting my grandparents (on the right). They're in the orchard at Old Hall.  Betty is my dad's girlfriend, but it's 1943, and he's gone off to the war, he's missing, in Singapore, they don't know if he's dead or alive. It will be a year or so before they learn that he's survived, and is a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army.

 

My cousin Barbara, aged twelve.

 

My dad, on return from the war,  shortly to be a civilian again.

 Betty sent him a 'Dear John' letter, to Changi (P.O.W. jail in Singapore)  but he didn't receive it until after his release, by which time she'd married someone else!

P.O.W. wages scrip.
As he said 'The  little bastards' promises aren't worth the paper they're printed on'.

Awesome!... Or, as they say, whence I am bound, "Ossum!"

Oh Shenandoah,

I love your daughter,

Away, you rolling river.

For her I'd cross,

The raging waters,

Away, I'm bound away,

'Cross the wide Missouri.

For ten long years, 

I courted Sally,  

A-way, you rolling river

She broke my heart, 

Here in this valley,

A-way, we're bound away, 

'Cross the wide Missouri.

 Tom Waits, with Keith Richards, and an un-named male-voice choir, recorded "Shenandoah", for a new muliti-artist album, titled 'Son of Rogues Gallery'.

I'd love to post it here, but the album is not out until 19th february. So the best I can do, is include a link to the player on NPR.

I know some, many, most, perhaps, of my readers just can't see any beauty in Tom's gravelly voice, but I urge you to give it a chance. 

Click on the link.

Sigh...

No, I know it's not a patch on your 'Best of Abba' album.... 

Or your 'Easy Listening Elevator Music' album.

I hear you all spluttering in denial "But I don't have an Abba album!'.

Humph!