Hendrix Of The Sahara

He taught himself how to play guitar—on an instrument he fashioned out of bicycle cables. He made ends meet by playing his virtuoso style of psych rock at weddings in the desert. But was he ever going to make it as a musician? Was anyone really listening? Somewhere, across the world, another restless soul was searching for him. This is the story of how Mdou Moctar came to be known as . . .

- David Kushner

In the wee hours of the morning one day in September 2013 in Agadez, Niger, an ancient market town in the middle of the Sahara, eight cops stormed a mud-brick home searching for a terrorist. There’d been reports of a white man with a bushy beard coming and going on a stolen motorcycle—an unusual sight made stranger by the colour of his bike: purple.

“Get up! Get up!” the cops shouted as they rustled awake the several men sleeping on the floor. They found not one but two white men, whom they took away for questioning.

At the police station, Christopher Kirkley, a pensive, close-cropped, 33-year-old from Portland, Oregon, explained that he and his bearded friend weren’t terrorists at all. “We’re making a movie!” he said in broken French. It was the first one shot not only in Agadez but in the language of the Tuareg, the seminomadic people who hadd roamed the region for centuries. The star of the film was one of the men asleep in the mud-brick home: Mahamadou Souleymane, aka Mdou Moctar, a lanky, 29-yearold, explosively gifted left-handed Tuareg guitarist who shredded like a Saharan Hendrix. And the purple motorcycle wasn’t stolen. They had rented and painted it to be the main prop. The men were released after Kirkley explained what the film was about. “It’s a homage to Purple Rain,” he told the cops.