'People From My Hometown Need Water To Drink': Mdou Moctar Has More on His Mind Than Music

Mdou Moctar shuffles into the hotel room with no shoes, a button up fleece jumper, PALACE tracksuit pants and a yawn. He’s tired. Not just physically – he just played two shows at the Sydney Opera House the night before (one of which I went to), travelled here from Niger, and has an out-of-whack sleeping pattern – but, seemingly, with talking about himself. 

I tap into this after 10 minutes of conversation. Throughout the first half of our interview I can see the boredom stretching across his face: “I heard you built a guitar, how did you do that?” (an internal sigh, he gets asked this a lot)/ “How does it feel to have fans in Australia?”/ “Did you ever think a decade ago that you’d be touring the world?”

They’re questions focused solely on him – his ascent into popularity in the Western world – and the mythically-oriented beginnings of his career. An American had heard the way he picked and strummed a guitar through a cellphone, tracked him down, and — thinking him to be the next virtuoso — delivered him his first left-handed guitar. 

While never rude, he was bored – and I could tell.  

It wasn’t until I asked him about the politics of his music, specifically on Afrique Victime (named the 8th best album of 2021 by Pitchfork), that he suddenly brightens, animatedly talking about the complexities of good and evil.

“In the beginning, people showed that they were mean and they were powerful. Now they show to the people, ‘we are good’, but it’s like when someone gives you honey but puts poison in it,” he says.

He’s referring to the current conflicts in his home continent of Africa, and specifically Niger, a country built on French colonialism, Western delusion and foreign powers' impenetrable greed. 

“I’m here and I’m thirsty, I’m hungry, but I don’t know that I have millions on millions of dollars [worth of gold] in my home,” he explains.

“And then you have someone that comes and is like, ‘You need someone like me to come and help you’, and they bring you a gallon of water and buy you some food for like $20. And you’re going to be very happy that you have the food and water but then they’ll take the gold for billions of dollars.”

Consistently, he steers the conversation to fulfilling basic needs: “People from my hometown,” he says, “they don’t have time for the guitar. They need water to drink.” 

Even in conversation, where he speaks on building his first guitar as a young teen with bike strings and wood sometime in the 2000s, he uses water-based metaphors.

“If you are thirsty, you don’t think about the colour of the water, you just need water, you don’t have a choice.”

“It was the same for me. I wanted to play, so I played. I didn’t have a musical store to buy the strings for the guitar. So what was I gonna do? I had to look in the area to see how I could have it. In my head I see the guitar. I know how it is. It was not a serious guitar but that guitar was very good for me. The sound is perfect, it was what I needed.”

This thoughtful mentality dictates the conversation. It’s not a surprising route, considering the contents of his music and his humble upbringings as a member of the semi-nomadic Tuerag people. 

Born sometime in the 80s in Abalak, a village in Niger, Mdou Moctar quickly rose to cult-fame after a series of rough recordings spread across the Sahara via cell phone bluetooth. In the mid-2010s, after being visited by the aforementioned American on a bike – he released a plethora of albums documenting his observations of the world around him. 

His most well-regarded release came in 2021, in the form of the 9-track album “Afrique Victime”. Over rolling guitar melodies that inch towards psychedelic and heart-thudding backbeats, he sings in the Tamasheq language: Africa is a victim of so many crimes/ If we stay silent it will be the end of us /Why is this happening?/ What is the reason behind this? 

To date, he has been described as The Talent of a generation or “The Hendrix of the Sahara” – a term he’s not too fond of.

“I love Jimi Hendrix, he’s very very talented but I am not Jimi Hendrix, I am Mdou Moctar,” he says.

But watching Moctar, you can see the root of the comparisons: his fingers sweep across a guitar in a way that trumps understanding. How could anyone consciously move that quickly to make a coherent sound? But he does, somehow. Not just coherently, but masterfully, despite being someone with no formal music training. It’s because of that lack of rigid teaching that his unique technique is able to blossom. A style that younger generations, he says, have now tried to replicate.

But his obvious rise into the limelight and recognition for his otherworldly talent – not only in his own country but around the world – doesn’t take away from the obvious fact that, for Mdou, basic need outweighs the frivolities of the fame that comes with the music. When Moctar says that being famous isn’t desirable or important – unlike other artists who surreptitiously revel in being revered – I believe him. 

In fact, we hardly talk about this at all, except for when he says “being rich or famous isn’t important for me, it’s important for me to make a lot of people happy.” 

He talks at length about building wells and classrooms for kids around his hometown. It’s what he’s doing now. Making enough money on tour to then finish the half-built classroom waiting for him at home. 

“I build wells with my own money but it’s not something I put on the internet because I do it from my heart. I don’t do it so everyone says, ‘oh, Mdou is a nice person’. I have to help the people,” he says. 

When we talk about his tour around Australia, a country he describes as one that seemed “very far away” he continues the conversation around the stereotypes and discrepancies placed on Africa by the outside world.

“The world has gotten very selfish. If I didn’t travel to be here, how am I going to know Australia? It’s the same if you don’t travel to Africa, how are you going to know Africa?”

“And then the government is doing a lot of bad things. The biggest thing they do is show that Africa has terrorists, Africa is bad, if you go you’re going to die. No, it’s not true. People need to go and see the reality.”

These realities amalgamate in his music, and, if anything, is a responsibility that Mdou holds to utmost importance.

“My music, for me, is to send a message around the world. It’s what I do. Even if it’s dangerous for me,” he says.

The danger? French colonisers: “They are stronger, they have power, it’s nothing for them to do something bad. [I get in trouble] every time [I go home], talking about it.”

Though his personality leans towards a pessimistic stoicism, when Mdou gets talking about his passion, a fire ignites in his eyes. As we move to end the conversation, I ask what his musical future looks like. He doesn’t necessarily answer the way I imagined.

“I’m looking for an organisation [charity] – I don’t know how to do it – but everyone knows Mdou Moctor and they know I work with Matador, they have my information.

“If someone feels like they want to work with me this way, then I’m ready. I’m here for that.”

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