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1-Festival on the Niger , Thursday 29 th to Sunday 1 st of February 2009 www.balanzantours.com
Segou and shows the image of a town with a rich history and open to the world. Each year the Festival organises a forum about themes that are important for the Malian society. In the Forum lecturers from around the world come together to create realistic debates that result in concrete recommendations. The Forum is becoming an international discussion platform. Traditional manifestations form Segou region Music, dance and puppets from the Segou basin are all ancestral rites of the region and are the living proof of its big cultural richness of the ancestral rites of the region. The Festival reserves a primordial place for these manifestations that contribute to the preservation and the promotion of these artistic expressions that form the cultural heritage of the region. Research permitted us to make an inventory of 15 different styles of dances and puppetry of the Segou region. The Festival has established a solid and respectful collaboration with different representatives (Bambaras, Bozos, Somonos, Korédugaw, Chasseurs...) of these artistic expressions in Segou and in surrounding villages in order to make the visitors of the festival discover this fabulous potential. The Festival has the ambition to make Segou into the Capital of Visual Arts. Segou has been since long the Bogolan town and counts as its own, some less known young talents, but also internationally well known artists such as Dolo Amahigueré. Therefore we can confidently say that the town is a reference in the field of Visual Arts and the Festival will ameliorate this status by creating an international meeting of visual artists. 2-Festival of the Desert at Essakane, 08 January to 10 2009. Magic comes from humans and nature. For all of us, the Festival in the Desert was just a simple step towards something essential, a touch of freedom, like exhaling a lung full of fresh air or like a song by Django, which turns awkwardness and tactlessness into something beautiful and human and excludes impoliteness. In Essakane, in the same group, we found traces of the secrets which are shared by the Indians and the Blue Men. It was like a ray of providential hope. If our destiny is a world without frontiers, then the nomadic tribes of the earth are guardians of an essential little parcel. A romantic vision perhaps, of another type of brotherhood, with three litres of water a day, forty Celsius at noon and zero at night, a few scorpions, wounds and scars, neither fear nor malice, electric guitars and generators. We all extinguished the candles of Carabosse. The breath taken away. The guests, they were organisers or just festival goers, whether their journey started thousands of miles away in Europe or North America or only a few hundred miles away in lone and level sands of the Sahara, whether they had come by plane, bus and Toyota Land Cruiser or the old quiet way, by camel... they were aIl stars too. Then there were the sheer and silky dunes of Essakane, the bright green acacia trees, the scuttling scarab beetles, the vast blue skies, the silent sunsets, the needling cram cram. It was a magical place that possessed star quality in abundance. At night, you looked up and the sky was creamy with stars, stern, sharp and breath takingly clear, with Orion crashing through the thick jungle of celestial brightness in search of his prey. You gorged on the stars and like some tortuous re-run of the Whacky Races, or returned at a more leisurely pace to their camps, their homes in Timbuktu, Kidal, Gao, Goundam, Tessalit and Bamako, there could be no doubt that the star that really stole the show, that planted a field of rich and luscious memories in the heads of everyone who had the great good fortune to be there, was the event itself : Nomads need to come together from time to time to catch up with news, settle disputes, race camels, make music and mix the gene pool. In the southern Sahara desert the Touaregs, or Kel Tamashek (people who speak Tamashek), as they prefer to be known, have been organising such gatherings for centuries. The severe droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, and the Tamashek wars of the early 1990s in northern Mali and Niger broke the traditional rhythm of nomadic life. After 1996, when up to three thousand firearms were burned in a symbolic "Flame of Peace" in a public square in Timbuktu, the nomadic and sedentary communities of the southern Sahara sought ways to rebuild their lives and their desert home. EFES, a Tamashek association whose statutory aim is to develop the north, hit on the idea of reviving the annual get-togethers of the nomads on a grand scale. Instead of just gathering together wandering groups of nomads in a 300 to 500 km radius around a festival site, they would throw the event open to the entire desert region, to the whole of Mali and eventually even to the world. With the invaluable help of certain European partners, notably the group Lo'Jo from Angers in France and their manager Philippe Brix, EFES staged the first Festival in the Desert in Tin Essako, east of Kidal, the capital of the far north-eastern corner of Mali, in January 2001. The moon was eclipsed and so was everyone's capacity for wonder. A year later a second, slightly smaller event was staged in Tessalit near the Algerian border, in the teeth of a sandstorm. 2003 in Essakane, however, was an altogether different order of marvel. The renowned Malian film- maker and now Minister for Culture, Cheikh Oumar Sissoko, spoke in his genuinely moving opening speech of the beauty of Mali's diversity and of how this Festival was the perfect expression of it. He spoke no lie. Bambara and Manding musicians from the south of the country, to whom Timbuktu and the Sahara were feared no-go regions, as alien as the Gobi desert until now, suddenly found themselves walking amongst ferocious looking Tamashek nomads without trepidation or concern. It was a heartfelt hymn to the peace and prosperity of an African nation, united, in music and feasting, for the time being at least. The three hundred and fifty strong non-African contingent slipped and slid through the flour soft sand, turbans wrapped tightly around their heads to protect them from the midday heat, bug eyed at the visual feast which met their gaze in every direction the towering camel riders, the gorgeously adorned Tamashek women, the dunes interwoven with hundreds of tents, the churning trucks and 4x4 vehicles, the azure sky and the ochre horizons. In the end you could cite many reasons why this event, this mass celebration of the blue note, was so enjoyable, despite the challenges of getting there, the physical discomforts and the cram cram, but all who witnessed the event will tell you that some kind of indefinable magic happened in those dunes near Timbuktu.
3-Cattle-crossing at Diafarabé Between November and December
The Niger River means many things to people in Mali. The Cattle Crossing Festival happens every year in Diafarabé, when the Fulani people celebrate the return of their young men and the cattle they've been herding on grazing lands across the river. The boys' cattle are then judged, and prizes are given. Girls in Diafarabé look forward to the Festival for another reason. It's their chance to see their boyfriends again. For the boys, the crossing can be a nerve-wracking time. "When the animals come back, they are driven into a large open space at one end of the town where there is a panel which judges them to decide whose animals are fat, in other words, whose animals have been best cared for. If your animals are judged the best-kept herd you're the winner, and the community gives you prizes: a special blanket, a robe, and many other gifts. The last word in the judging is always with the vet. The boy with the worst-kept herd is given a peanut, which is quite a shameful thing. Last year the boy who was given the peanut went back to the bush a week later and now, this year, his animals are very fat and his people have all been congratulating him instead of complaining about him like they did last year."
Festival at Anderamboukane at Gao From 20 January to 23 2009
COULIBALY BABA Manager <><><><><><><><><><><><> ~~~ BALANZAN TOURS ~~~ TRAVEL AND DISCOVERY
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