The Desert Blues

by Joshua Hammer

Manny Ansar and Iyad Ag Ghali had little in common—one was a politically connected intellectual, the other a rebel waging war on behalf of his nomadic people in the middle of the Sahara. They did share one thing, though: a passion for Mali's desert blues, a haunting mix of traditional music infused with the influence of Elvis Presley, Bob Marley, and Jimi Hendrix.

The Festival in the Desert was born out of that shared passion. A grand spectacle in Mali's desolate dunes, the festival attracted some of the most famous musicians in the world, including Bono, Jimmy Buffet, and Robert Plant. But as the music flourished, the friendship turned to enmity. Ghali, who once openly scoffed at religious piety, succumbed to the pull of radical Islam. Ansar, who couldn't fathom his friend’s transformation, maintained the festival in the face of increasing threats of deadly violence.

In "The Desert Blues", veteran foreign correspondent Joshua Hammer lays bare the longing at the heart of Mali's legendary sound, and brings to life the jubilant possibility the festival represented and the deadly drama that ripped it all apart.

31 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 30, 2015

About the author

Joshua Hammer was born in New York and educated at Horace Mann and Princeton University, graduating with a BA in English literature. In 1988 he joined Newsweek Magazine as a business and media writer, transitioning to the magazine's foreign correspondent corps in 1992. Hammer served, successively, as bureau chief in Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Cape Town, and also was the magazine's Correspondent at Large in 2005 and 2006. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in the 2004-2005 academic year.

Since leaving Newsweek in 2006 Hammer has been an independent foreign correspondent, a contributing editor at Smithsonian Magazine and Outside, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, and other US publications. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in reporting in 2003, and won the award, for his writing about the Ebola crisis in West Africa, in 2016. He is the author of 5 non-fiction books, including the New York Times bestseller, "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu," which was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2016. Hammer is currently based in Berlin.