Festival in the Desert

Essakane:

This is my 5th time in Mali, but it will be my longest stay. The plan is to set up camp for a year here in Bamako to conduct my dissertation fieldwork. After finishing a freezing semester up in Ithaca, I decided to celebrate with a trip up past Timbuktu to the Festival in the Desert (www.festivalaudesert.com). What better a way to start dissertation fieldwork than a roadtrip up to the middle of the desert to watch some live music?

So, me, my husband - Idrissa, my little brother Tommy aka Zander (www.zanderbleck.com), his photographer friend Michael, our college friend Derek, and his friend Wanja rented a 4X4 and drove for pretty much two and a half days - through Mopti then Timbuktu - all the way to the village of Essakane. Zander and Michael were straight from Manhattan, while Derek and Wanja are working in Southern Sudan '- so we had quite an ecletic posse - led by our fearless and well-connected leader- our driver Papa. Despite state department warnings of threats against Westerners at the festival - we decided to brave it.

Essakane was one of the coolest sights I have ever seen. After hours of driving and waiting for 40 something car in front of us to take the hour long ferry across Niger - the last stretch through sanddunes - we arrived at a festival sight -littered with traditional Tuareg tents, camels, and the giant mainstage. We were feeling pretty action adventure for making it up there until we saw that the dominant tourist demographic at the festival were 60 something Westerners. I cannot explain this phenomena - former hippies love of live music or empty-nesters with enough resources to pay the tour fees to come up there? However, it was amazing to watch Salif Keita and others on the main stage and then look out to the throbbing crowd full of these adventurous babyboomers, Tuareg teenagers, craft vendors from Southern Mali, soldiers off their shift, and all of the other musicians that made up 3 great days of music. The stage was set in the middle of a series of sanddunes, so people could sit on all sides and watch the music. During the evening, there were camel races and traditional dances down this ravine. Then as night fell - they lit charcoal fires in chicken wire baskets along the dunes so you could huddle around it with your friends and take in the music, the full moon, and the vast expanse of sand.

Our accomodations were less glamarous- we rented a tent from a Tuareg family- which was covered above and below with spur like vegetation called cram crams. So after the music ended around 2, when we were tired of after parties and such we would lay down in the freezing cold tent and try to sleep without acknowledging the painful presence of these cram crams. We arose to the sounds of camels bleating into our tent (they sound and look very star wars).

It was an amazing trip - now our friends have left and we are back in Bamako trying to set up camp. As I am signing off, a cell phone went off in the internet cafe next to me- the ringtone was nothing other than Barak Obama^s acceptance speech. Five days away. Its a very exciting time to be in Africa.