Page 98 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

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 color of his bike: purple.
“Get up! Get up!” the cops shouted as
they rustled awake the several men sleep-
ing 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, thirty-
three-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 ever shot not only in Agadez
but in the language of the Tuareg, the
seminomadic people who’d 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, twenty-nine-
year-old, explosively gifted left-handed
Tuareg guitarist who shredded like a
Saharan Hendrix. And the purple motor-
cycle 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 an homage
to Purple Rain,” he told the cops.

MDOU MOCTAR WAS never meant to play
guitar. While he was growing up in Arlit,
Niger, a uranium-mining desert town, his
strict Muslim parents, Souleymane and
Fatima, considered guitars instruments
of evil for booze, hash, and
heresy. But like anyone who Mdou Moctar’s touring band,
hears the clarion call of rock clockwise from bottom:
’n’ roll, Moctar couldn’t Moctar (guitar, vocals),
resist. “It’s like drinking Michael Coltun (bass guitar),
Ahmoudou Madassane
alcohol,” he remembers.
(guitar, vocals), and
“Everyone gonna say it’s bad Souleymane Ibrahim (drums).
for you. But when you drink