Lying in a tent erected outside his house, Maulud Emhamed Sidi Bashir is listening to a small silver handheld radio. In the Sahrawi refugee camps near Tindouf in south-western Algeria, people often set up traditional tents like this on the doorsteps of newer buildings. The crackling electric guitar notes Bashir, 75, is listening to are a similar mix of traditional and modern. Many of the songs, his relatives say, are by a band called El Wali.
It can take a while to figure out what, exactly, El Wali is. There is not much information on Google and only one album on YouTube (without the names of the singers or musicians). The very place where the band originated, the Western Sahara, is a question mark to most people. But El Wali has become a sort of national orchestra, a group whose songs don’t have credits and don’t belong to anybody; a shapeshifting entity that changes members over generations.
Driving through the Hamada desert, Lud Mahmud, a member of the independence movement Polisario Front, tries to explain. He points to the camp spread across the flat rocky plain. “This is El Wali,” he says. A few kilometres later, at the next camp, he says again: “This is El Wali.” The concept is clear: everything is El Wali when it comes to Polisario music. Some members stay in the band longer than others, but there have been so many that each camp has certainly provided more than one.
Situated between Morocco and Mauritania, this desert was a Spanish province – and one of the last European colonies in Africa – until 1975, when Spain handed it over to Morocco. The Western Sahara’s native people, the Sahrawis, were a mixture of nomadic tribes with almost no concept of nation before Morocco forced them from their land. In the late 1970s, they found refuge in south-western Algeria, where, unified by the common enemy, they laid the foundations of a new nation, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR).
Led by the leftwing Polisario Front, they started a guerrilla war against Morocco that lasts to this day. The conflict has recently intensified, especially after the then-US President Donald Trump recognised Moroccan claims over the territory in 2020. Although largely forgotten by the international community, this is one of Africa’s longest wars and a continuing fight against colonisation (Western Sahara is considered by the UN a non-self-governing territory, essentially a colony of Morocco).
Bashir and Mahmud were among the tens of thousands of people who had to leave their houses in Western Sahara and flee to the camps in Algeria, where the Polisario used music to help spark a national identity. Traditional poetry, infused with lyrics about the struggle against Morocco, was adapted into songs. The result was a stunning arrangement of western and local instruments played by a band that would soon take the name of El Wali.
“I came from the bullets,” says Ahdaidhum Abaid Lagtab, a former member of El Wali, during a performance given by the current iteration of the band in the Sahrawi refugee camp of Laayoune. “I came in the middle of the occupation – and I remember the dead Sahrawis.” At the age of 16, Lagtab, like Bashir, escaped from the advance of the Moroccan army in the mid 1970s. “We didn’t sing about specific politics,” she adds, “but about society. We talked about freedom.”
She joined El Wali in 1979, when the band was already active, with around a dozen members, and had taken the name of the co-founder and most famous martyr of the Polisario Front: El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed. With the look of a rock star and the charisma of Che Guevara, he galvanised the incipient nation before he was killed in 1976 aged about 28 during a raid. He is still the Sahrawis’ hero par excellence.
Accustomed to a world of contracts and copyrights, breakups and reunions, we tend to frame a band in a definite space and time. For El Wali, this is not the case. “At the beginning, it was work for the nation, organised by the nation,” explains Salma Mohamed Said, AKA Shueta, a veteran singer and drummer who started with El Wali at its inception. “Each district would choose an artist to join the national band. Some would play traditional instruments, such as the drums. Others would play modern instruments, like the guitar and keyboard. The traditional balanced the modern.” Sitting in her living room, furnished with large carpets and cushions, Shueta remembers the 1980s and early 1990s with the band: “We played in concerts from Libya to South Africa, from Portugal to East Germany to North Korea.”
In 1994, El Wali went to Belgium for a recording session organised by Oxfam. “I remember Shueta and the band,” says Hilt Teuwen, who managed the production. “I had met them in the camps and invited them to Belgium. The result was a very good quality recording.” This was a fabulous album called Tiris, 13 songs played with three singers, electric guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and tidinit, a traditional Sahrawi lute. It is a mix of joyful yet nostalgic tunes that tell the origins of the war against Morocco and the story of a people in exile dreaming of independence. “We kept in touch for a while, then the composition of the band changed – but El Wali as such still exists.”
The world – or at least the west – would have probably lost track of Tiris if it wasn’t for a self-described “guerrilla ethnomusicologist” and producer from Oregon named Christopher Kirkley. Around 2009, Kirkley was touring the Sahel (a stretch of the southern Sahara) and west Africa to collect samples of local music for an album series called Music from Saharan Cellphones.
“At that time,” he says, “the internet wasn’t very widespread in the region. But mobiles and Bluetooth were, and people used them to listen to and exchange music. The only way to get songs was to copy them from one phone to another. It was a network.” During his research, songs from El Wali kept popping up on memory cards and sims but Kirkley wasn’t aware of who the performers were at the time. “There wasn’t much information; they were often just titled Polisario.”
According to Kirkley, Sahrawi music helped introduce the region to the electric guitar, which really took hold in west Africa in the 1990s. A lot of the better-known Tuareg guitar music – sometimes known as desert blues or Tuareg rock, played by the likes of Mdou Moctar and Grammy-nominated Tinariwen – was hugely influenced by Sahrawi guitar music. “Especially the upbeat and kind of reggae rhythm, those have an origin in Sahrawi music,” he says. “It was the definitive sound of Western Sahara.”
After releasing Music from Saharan Cellphones Volume Two in 2012, he began an eight-year investigative journey to retrace the origins of those Sahrawi songs so in vogue on the region’s mobiles. Through people who were working in NGOs in Western Sahara, he got in touch with Sahrawi music producer Hamdi Salama, who introduced him to Ali Mohammed (the guitarist on El Wali’s Tiris), who told him about the recording session in Belgium with Oxfam. The studio engineer, Pierre Jonckheer, who recorded the album, happened to have a copy of Tiris on CD.
“You couldn’t find any references to this CD anywhere in the world, it disappeared from the internet and any western media,” Kirkley says. “There is something fascinating in a music resonating and surviving on a network of phones. Without it, it probably wouldn’t ever have this second life.”
In 2019, Kirkley and Salama rereleased El Wali’s Tiris, now available on Spotify and YouTube, where this whole story began. They are now working on a new release of music from the Sahrawi band. “The new album that we want to release was made by completely different people,” says Kirkley. “It’s confusing because you have to bring it to an audience and say: ‘Yes, this is also El Wali.’”
Back in the desert, a large national parade is being held to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sahrawis’ struggle against occupation. The day is dominated by the military with armed vehicles carrying outdated rockets past onlookers who gather on top of cars under the punishing sun. The night, though, belongs to music. Shueta takes the stage, as she has many times before, to sing from exile. Much of the crowd is too young to ever have seen the homeland her lyrics speak of, but each strum of electric guitar carries with it the shimmering promise of a Sahrawi state and the unbroken music of El Wali.
