Women of Timbuktu find their voice again after nightmare of jihadi rule | World news | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/25/women-timbuktu-shape-city-future-mali
t was, says Khaira Arby with some pride, her music that swung the election in favour of Timbuktu’s first female MP. Arby had been asked by the only female candidate, Aziza Mint Mohamed, to perform at a rally on the last day of campaigning in Mali’s national assembly elections of 2013. She had travelled the 560 miles from Bamako to Timbuktu especially, setting up her band in the sandy acres of open ground between the 14th-century adobe-walled Sankoré mosque and the city’s single paved road.
When she reached the city, Arby, a desert blues legend and cousin of the late Ali Farka Touré, discovered Mint Mohamed’s main rival was holding a simultaneous rally a few hundred metres away in the Grand Marché. When “the nightingale of the north” started to sing, however, the unfortunate contender’s audience began to move northwards towards the soulful notes that were drifting out of the Place Sankoré. Mint Mohamed went on to win the election.
