Mawja GLITTERBEAT 8/10

Eloquent songs of resistance from the Western Sahara.

By Nigel Williamson

AZIZA BRAHIM’S homeland of Western Sahara is listed by the UN as the last remaining colony in Africa. Under Spanish control until 1976, the territory was then annexed by Morocco and has been under occupation ever since. Denied self-determination, many of its people, the Sahrawi, were forced into exile in refugee camps in the Algerian desert. Those camps are where Brahim was born, her mother having fled the family’s ancestral home following Morocco’s military invasion.

Growing up, Brahim recalls singing as the principal form of entertainment, and she was soon setting to music the verse of her grandmother, Lkhadra Mint Mabrook, acelebrated Sahrawi writer, revolutionary and feminist hero known as “the poet of the rifle”.

In her teens, Brahim was educated in Cuba before returning to the desert in 1995, where she joined the National Sahrawi Music Group. She then chose Spain as asuitable base from which to raise the plight of her oppressed people via her music.

Aft erreleasing her debut album in 2012 –which included settings of her grandmother’s poems – she was signed by Glitterbeat, for whom she has recorded aseries of proudly defiant albums full of moving songs yearning for her homeland and espousing the cause of freedom.

A fearless moderniser who at the same time sounds somehow ancient, her work to date has found acclaim in world music circles without making the transition from aWOMAD audience to the mainstream in the way that, say, Tinariwen have done. Deeply rooted and yet sonically adventurous, Mawja should, if there is any justice, change that.

‘Mawja’ means ‘wave’ in the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic, a reference to the radio signal which, as she grew up in the refugee camp, kept her in touch with the outside world and the electronic “waves” that now carry her music and the story of her people to a wider audience.

Since her last album, 2019’s Sahari, much has happened to turn Brahim’s universe upside down and the travails have fed into Mawja to create her most accomplished and rounded work to date. With her mother, brothers and sisters and one of her daughters still living in the barren region of the Algerian desert known as The Devil’s Garden, she suffered acrisis of anxiety, characteristic of many exiles separated from their loved ones, which was exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. Then in November 2020 the uneasy 30-year ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front, the armed wing of the Sahrawi liberation movement, broke down and fighting resumed.