Going back to his roots

This eternal rebel is 42 years old. He’s now a family man but age hasn’t mellowed him, he’s as quick-witted as ever. With Gnawa Diffusion, the group he founded nearly a quarter of a century ago, he has begun a new Algerian tour, a huge success and an opportunity for him to rediscover the flavours of his childhood.

It will have taken him thirty-one years to come full circle, back to the place where (perhaps) it all began for him. In Sidi Bel-Abbès. Amazigh Kateb and his group Gnawa Diffusion, closed the tour there with two concerts (29th and 30th March), a ten-day mini tour which also saw them also performing in Algiers (20th March) and Oran (27th). A ‘real return to the flavours of childhood’. ‘I was born in Algiers, but in 1977 my parents had just divorced and my father then took me to Sidi Bel-Abbès because he had just been appointed director of the regional theatre.’ Dad wasn’t just anybody: he was Kateb Yacine, the most celebrated post-independence Algerian writer, the ‘radical rebel’ who still has a special place in the cultural pantheon and national collective conscience, even twenty-five years after his death. ‘All my education from the age of 5 to 11 took place there’, he recalls. As for the theatre, I was familiar with every nook and cranny as I spent entire days watching my father working with his troupe.’ As a kid, therefore, he will have witnessed the great emotions any actor experiences on stage. And he will remember it... This 2015 Algerian tour has indeed met with incredible success — the Coupole d’Alger arena has been ablaze with 7,000 over-excited fans and the concerts have sold out. Ultimately, there’s only one observation to make: Gnawa Diffusion can still set the Al Djazaïr audience on fire, as it has always done since Amazigh founded the group in Grenoble in 1992, three years after his arrival in France.

No one here has forgotten his volcanic eruption onto the North African scene with his second CD, Algeria, in 1997; thousands of these young Algerians and Moroccans rocking out to this explosive combustion of reggae, rock chaabi music, and especially gnawa music, the dialect of former black slaves ‘imported’ into the north of the Sahara several centuries ago.

He is now 42 years old and his gaunt face makes him look more and more like his father. You might think that anyone who has always declared himself to be against all authority and was banned from Algeria for insubordination in 1992 would now be older and wiser, but you’d be wrong. For him, fatherhood is not incompatible with radicalism.

Amazigh is firing on all cylinders. On the shortcomings of his native country: ‘it’s not all a bed of roses, but the young people are on fire! The authorities know very well that the day they let culture express itself, it will be the language of the revolution that will take over.’  On France, his second homeland: ‘I abhor this secular fanaticism that they are trying to impose in the name of national unity. On Qatar: ‘We do not need money from a country that exports jihadism throughout the world.’ On religion: ‘it has always been exploited by political and social systems. My father wrote that religion messed up the world. He had nothing against the believers, just against the proselytisers.’ His father, always his father, he does not want to ‘kill’ him, as western children often want to do, on the contrary. His next solo album will include some of his words and sayings: ‘he was the one who sharpened my critical sense’, he explains. ‘I’ve always felt I had the responsibility of keeping him alive after his death. I feel his compassion. It’s like a kind of recollection of a period before Islam and monotheism.’ It’s also called ancestor worship... You can’t get any more African than that…