"Footsteps In Africa" musically documents nomadic desert tribes

Kathi von Koerber (courtesy of Kiahkeya Prod.)

It’s hard to imagine a more hostile environment than that depicted in Footsteps In Africa.

Desolate stretches of Saharan desert dotted only by an occasional shrub and sand-covered tent is the stark scenery in the documentary about the wandering Saharan desert nomads of Mali. But just as “life is nature,” as stated early on, music is life.

Indeed, Tuareg/Kel Tamashek nomadic tribes followed in the film seem to start humming just by gazing into a campfire, or break into group chanting/clapping over just about any other impetus.

“A Tuareg dances and sings with everybody,” a tribesman reveals. “We don’t think ‘What is music? What is dance?’ They are a part of life.”

Director Kathi Von Koerber’s subjects sing “because we are happy. We see something that interests us or pleases us and we create something.”

A “collective endeavor [that] travels and belongs to everyone,” the music expresses “what all the world’s music expresses…the emotions, the love of your close friends, the love of a beautiful camel, the love of nature. We say one heart opens another heart. If a heart doesn’t open another heart, than life isn’t worth living.”

But there’s very little dialog in Footsteps in Africa. The soundtrack is mainly the music of daily life and tribal rituals, along with performances by Tuareg bands Tinariwen and Tartit, Malian vocalist/guitarist Habib Koite, Moroccan master musician Hassan Hakmoun and Iranian world music composer Jamshied Sharifi.

The soundtrack’s intent, says von Koerber, is to achieve a “transcendental frequency” in the manner of the extraordinary 1993 gypsy music documentary Latcho Drom.

“It keeps going and going and the frequencies change, but there’s a universality of sound of people connected to the earth that runs through it and has a calming, harmonizing effect,” says von Koerber. Contributing to the effect, she adds, is her documentary’s “spiral—not linear—storyline based on a natural flow.”

She refers to the organic “road story” nature of the film, which was driven by “intuition” as she and her film crew started at the annual Tuareg music Festival in the Desert in Essakane, Mali in 2006, then were guided by people she met at the Festival. The five-week jaunt by jeep visited various villages and desert locations following directions like “go left at the sand dune, right at the tree.”

Von Koerber uses the word “spiral” in describing the film and its production to link it with the Tuareg mystical spiral symbol that is reflected in their artwork and cosmic outlook. “They have no TV to watch,” she explains, “so they have a strong connection with the stars. That’s their TV, and how they navigate.”

A successful world music VJ and dancer with a background in film and video production, von Koerber has lived all over the world and is now working on similar documentary projects via her Kiahkeya multicultural production company (she says the New York-based company’s name derives from a Sanskrit word denoting “the beginning of a new flower”). The first one similarly focuses on Pygmy culture in Gabon, Africa and the Yanomami of the Amazon.

Another documentary centers on “dance and environmentalism” in Alaska, Utah and Hawaii—“three different environments and ecologies,” von Koerber says. By filming dancers from a helicopter, the film will show “the relationship of man to nature and nature to man” without the benefit of dialog.

Footsteps In Africa, meanwhile, is now out on DVD (a soundtrack CD is also available) with part of the profits going to the Tuareg families and representatives featured in the film, specifically in order to facilitate clean water. As the film notes, surviving droughts is the Tuareg’s biggest problem.

The second biggest, perhaps, is “to maintain our place in the world” in the face of modernity, as a Festival participant put it.

“The music gives me the strength instead of putting a sword into someone’s stomach,” he said. “But instead I know I have a culture that is strong, that gives me the strength to face all of the problems that this new world brings.”

The film then concludes with a telling epigram: “A way of life for thousands of years does not die easily.”
 

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