African bluesman Ali Farka Toure is about to trade his guitar in for a hoe, the preferred tool of farmers in his desert hometown of Niafunke, and has vowed never again to tour outside of Mali.
”I’ve been around the world five times, received honours left and right, and now I want to look after young Malian and African artists, and most of all, farming,” the award winning artist said.
Reclining on a mat in his flower-covered house in Bamako, the 63-year-old, known for his distinctive blues-inflected playing style, explained why he will only perform in the Malian capital from now on.
”I thought about it a lot,” he said, showing with pride a membership card to his own fanclub: ”Ali Farka Toure — Profession: farmer.”
Here he owns 40 hectares of paddy fields, 2 800 fruit trees, four motorised pumps and two trucks.
”The land doesn’t lie. It respects you if you respect it,” he said, gently picking up his first ever musical instrument, a traditional violin from 1950.
”I’ve sung about work, farming, education, peace… My music is genuinely Malian, African,” he said, still unable to understand why some still want ”to ape the West when our music is so rich”.
Toure relates the suffering of life, beginning with the death of his mother’s first nine children. Nicknamed Farka or donkey to ward off evil spirits, Toure became the lucky tenth.
As an adolescent, he toyed with politics in the 1950s, before working on the docks, as a driver, and at last as a sound engineer with Radio Mali, whose orchestra in 1971 gave him his first taste of show business.
After his first single, ”Mariam Barry” in 1976, Toure was ”discovered” in Bamako by a holidaying couple from London, who brought him to Manchester and then to worldwide success.
Playing concerts from Iceland to Japan, Toure learned his life’s philosophy: ”What God gives you, no one can take away.”
Though he was already quite well known in west Africa, it took his 1994 collaboration with American musician Ry Cooder to take his music to a wider audience.
”Talking Timbuktu” won a Grammy and gave many their first taste of the rich variety of African music.
He now lives most of the time in his childhood village of Niafunke, some 200 kilometres from the legendary desert town of Timbuktu at the edge of the Sahara.
Toure is married to ”two and a half women” — the half being a Dutch woman, with whom he had a religious but not a civil wedding.
She lives in the Netherlands with their three daughters, said Toure, who has fathered nine other children.
The guitarist has one regret: not being able to read or write French — Mali is a former French colony — having never been to school.
The wizened musician opened a cupboard and pulled out a mock-up album sleeve, his farewell to his fans. ”It’s the last one”, number 16, he sighed.
But it’s not completely over yet. On July 5, Toure and his band will take to the stage at a one-off concert in Washington, DC as part of the 2003 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. – Sapa-AFP