“Unlike the landscape, the people living in the Sahel are
anything but homogenous. In every town is another language,
culture, tradition, a demonstration of vastness of human
complexity… so it goes with the guitar.”  The Sahel is the
region in Africa where desert becomes savanna—a scrubby, harsh
blur of land that stretches across the entire continent and
includes parts of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Nigeria, and to the
East, areas in Chad and Sudan. Formal political borders are
overwhelmed by the monotonous landscape and, by contrast, the
diverse peoples who live in the Sahel, many of whom are nomadic.
In the Western part, there is a long history of conflict among
the Taureg people, the desert countries’ governments (Mali, in
particular), and severe Islamist regimes. This means a history
of displacement and uncertainty, diasporas created and then
dispersed. In fact, due to a recent outbreak of violence in
Northern Mali, the region’s most famous musical event, the
Festival Au Desert, has been exiled, reconfigur