While his band was away on tour, a military coup erupted at home

When the Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar enters the screen’s frame for our interview, he gazes fondly at the small glass of green tea he’s holding. “We cook it, like, three times. I didn’t like the first, it’s so strong for me. I prefer number two and number three,” say Moctar of a Tuareg tea service’s successive steepings. “It’s so sweet, I love sugar.”

In March last year at Victoria’s Golden Plains festival, the hand delicately holding that tea glass was a fist thrust skyward as Moctar mounted a stage monitor. The frenzied crowd responded in kind. It was as though Moctar’s howling guitar and the rhythm section’s escalating pace had supercharged the air with a delirious vibrational force.

“It’s traditional music from my hometown… Berber [music from] the desert. [At] the same time, we push it to what you call ‘rock’. I didn’t know what you call rock. Michael, my bass player, tells me this sounds like rock. For me, it’s just played very fast,” say Moctar.

Moctar and band – rhythm guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane, drummer Souleymane Ibrahim and bassist Mikey Coltun; the band is named after its frontman but considers itself an egalitarian unit – have just released their seventh album. Titled Funeral for Justice, the album’s a blistering screed of political protest and mournful desert poetry cementing them in the upper echelons of guitar-based heavy music. Following the album’s recording during the band’s 2023 North American tour, a military coup erupted in its home country, Niger, stranding them stateside.

“It was so scary… but in the end we adapted. I flew home after two months. We had to help the poor, because [there was] no work in that time and the food was very expensive. One house has, like, nine kids. It’s crazy to survive [like] that,” says Moctar of the situation he found in Tchintabaraden, a town in the Azawagh region, a dry basin of semi-arid and desert flatlands that sprawls across western Niger, northeastern Mali and southern Algeria, inhabited by the semi-nomadic Tuareg.

On the namesake Funeral for Justice cut Tchinta, Moctar sings lovingly of his hometown’s landscape in the Tuareg Tamasheq language, translated as:

I’ve roamed the globe for many years
Yet, Chinta’s splendour remains unmatched
Ascending the majestic crest of Chinayfed dune
Nostalgia for my land engulfs my soul

Moctar sings in Tamasheq as an act of preservation. Niger has 11 national languages and yet its official language is French, a hangover from colonisation. Moctar is worried young people are losing their native tongue and ability to write in Tamasheq’s distinctive Tifinagh script.

“The young generation think learning the French language is better than learning Tifinagh. If you learn French, you [can get a] degree or masters. If you read just Tifinagh, you can’t get a job in our country,” says the 39-year-old Moctar, clearly distressed. “To see someone [who is] 20 years old write you something in Tifinagh? Impossible. If no one can write Tifinagh in the future, even our language is gonna go away.”

As well as using proceeds from his music to fund new wells in and around Tchintabaraden, Moctar hopes to fund educational initiatives to preserve the language and script.

Mdou Moctar plays an extension of assouf, a style of Tuareg guitar music pioneered since the 1970s by the band Tinariwen, that they tear into hard and fast. Loosely translated, assouf means loss, longing or homesickness. That translation has led some in the Western press to dub it “desert blues”, a lazy descriptor reeking of colonial hierarchy.

Assouf is characterised by its deep emotional resonance and is a vehicle for exposing the brutal shadow of French colonisation. France ended its formal governance of the region in the middle of last century (troops and influence remained), leaving the Tuareg split across Algeria, Libya, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. Rebellions have been unsuccessful in establishing a Tuareg nation state.

“The Tuareg doesn’t care about the borders… we feel we are brothers. It’s difficult, the politics and the governments try to divide us, but we still push ourselves and push the younger generations to understand what is going on,” says Moctar.

“We understand that we don’t have the power to break all those borders, but we have the power to keep our [friendship] in our heart, share our feeling between us and try to make our community stronger than before.”

Moctar famously built his first guitar using bicycle brake cables for strings, as did Tinariwen’s founder Ibrahim Ag Alhabib in the ’70s. Tinariwen’s music spread through north-west Africa via bootlegged cassette tapes, and in Moctar’s case heavily compressed MP3s, first shared throughout the internet-sparse region phone-to-phone over Bluetooth, then via Whatsapp in the 2010s.

Sonically, Moctar’s music departs from Tinariwen’s hypnotic expression of assouf. One of his early Bluetooth hits, Tahoultine, uses drum machines and vocal processing software (YouTube commenters lacking a reference point compare it to Kanye West and hyperpop duo 100 Gecs).

But now, signed to US indie label Matador (which released their breakthrough album Afrique Victime in 2021), Mdou Moctar make a rapturous maelstrom of guitar, bass and drums. The music speaks directly to a moment in which colonial powers react with either support, complicity or indifference to the world’s atrocities: the invasion of Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, famine in Yemen, or precious-mineral conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Take the Funeral for Justice closer Modern Slaves:

Oh world, why be so selective about human beings?
My people are crying while you laugh
All you do is watch
Oh world, why be so selective about countries?
Yours are well-built while ours are being destroyed.

Following Niger’s July 2023 coup, France withdrew its last 1500 troops from the country, at the junta’s request in December. The United States is preparing to do the same. Russia is occupying the vacuum, moving east from Mali, where its mercenary Wagner Group (renamed the Africa Corps in late 2023) has established a foothold. Early on the morning of the album’s release, Russian troops entered Airbase 101, a facility currently hosting US troops who are now in perilously close proximity.

“I feel the world is manipulated by all leaders, not just African leaders. They write for their community what they want them to know… They don’t want them to see the truth and that’s not justice,” says an impassioned Moctar.

“If one baby dies in America, or in Europe, or in Asia, you’re gonna see it in the papers, see it on Facebook, Instagram, everywhere. Imagine how many kids die in Palestine? How many kids are dying in Sudan? How many kids are dying in Libya? How many kids are dying in Somalia? Now, is that justice? It’s not justice.”

Moctar’s outspokenness has resulted in threats from Islamist extremists scandalised by perceived Western influences in his music and from pro-coup actors, a movement Moctar opposes, just as he did French colonialism. His only wish is peace.

“We have to say that even if it’s difficult, even if it’s unsafe for us,” he says. “All those feelings push us to do this album and give it this strong name: Funeral for Justice.”

As our interview comes to a close, I wish Moctar enjoyable second and third infusions of tea and he cracks a wide smile. “Thank you. We’ll share it one day, maybe we’re gonna drink tea together.”

Mdou Moctar’s Funeral for Justice is out now.

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