Phone to phone, in Tamasheq

Songs in Tamasheq crossed the Sahara by Bluetooth and memory card, on a network listeners built from the phones in their pockets. When the language had no word for purple, its speakers named it with the words they had.

Mdou Moctar sings in Tamasheq, his own language. Once, in Agadez, he wanted to visit a friend in Niamey, so he took the bus. On the way, he told Wired in 2022, many passengers had their phones out, and everyone was listening to his music. Then the driver put it on too. That was when he first knew his songs were catching on. They had spread the way music spread across the Sahel in those years, by Bluetooth, from one phone to the next. Hardly anyone knew what the musicians on their phones looked like, his bassist Mikey Coltun told the magazine. What travelled was the voice.

That network needed no internet. In West Africa, Wired explains, the years after CDs brought market stalls selling SIM and micro-SD cards loaded with songs, and then friends began sending tracks straight from one phone to another by Bluetooth. Cheap phones held whole music collections and played them through tinny little speakers. The Mail & Guardian described it as an unofficial MP3 network trading songs from Abidjan to Bamako and Algiers. Christopher Kirkley, who spent years recording music in the region, has said that he once left music behind in Niger and later found the same song in Mauritania.

Mdou's own start was made from what was at hand. At a young age he taught himself on a guitar he built from wood and bicycle wire. In 2008 he went to Sokoto, in Nigeria, to record, inspired by the Auto-Tuned songs of Hausa films, and one song from those sessions, Anar, became a smash hit on what the Mail & Guardian called the Sahara cellphone network. The album was not sold commercially until 2014. By then the phones had already carried it.

Kirkley, an American from Portland, started a blog called Sahel Sounds in 2009, and it grew into a record label. He collected on the same network. He copied MP3s from the memory cards of people's phones, and Mdou's music reached him by Bluetooth, the way it reached everyone else. Dazed reports that he spent years tracking the singer down. In December 2011 he released Music from Saharan Cellphones, a record of songs that had been living on those cards, with Mdou's song Tahoultine on it.

Then the two of them made a film in Agadez, in Tamasheq, with money raised online. It was a remake of Prince's Purple Rain of 1984, with Mdou in Prince's part, a young guitarist up against his rivals. The dialogue was largely improvised, Kirkley told Afropop, so the actors found their own words as they went. The African Film Festival in New York has called it the first feature fiction film in the language.

There was still the title. Tamasheq has no word for purple, NPR and the Mail & Guardian reported, so the film is called Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai, rain the colour of blue with a little red in it. Anyone who has mixed paint knows that is how you make purple. The title borrowed nothing from English or French. It was first shown in Agadez in September 2014, to a loud crowd packed in beyond capacity, and Kirkley planned to release it in West Africa on DVD, on USB sticks and through phones, along the roads the songs had already opened.

In 2021 one of Mdou Moctar's albums came out in a limited edition on a Nokia phone, with the songs already on it. Afropop called it a homage to his roots, when songs passed from phone to phone by Bluetooth, and noted that the phone apparently worked anywhere with 2G. The phones sold out.

Put the two halves side by side. When Tamasheq met a colour it had no single word for, its speakers named it with words they already had. When the songs needed a way across the desert, listeners made one from things they already owned, a memory card, a Bluetooth link, a stall in the market, a cheap phone. Each time the language had what it needed. What people built was the means to carry it, and they built it themselves.

At Namu, a name that means ours in Hausa, we build voice technology for the languages of the Sahel, with the voices, and the agreement, of the people who speak them. We build it for the phones people already carry, because that is where these languages already live and travel, spoken out loud, from one person to the next.