Fatou Seidi Ghali once had to practise on her brother’s guitar in secret. She and her band, Les Filles de Illighadad, are now taking the world by storm

'My father said I should be looking after the cows': the first female Tuareg guitarist

'My father said I should be looking after the cows': the first female Tuareg guitarist

Les Filles de Illighadad are in their dressing room, listening to music on their phones and scrolling through social media apps. Fatou Seidi Ghali, the band’s lead guitarist and singer, leans in to show me a Snapchat she has just received from a friend: in a hilly desert, a white-robed man is riding a horse at full speed. He tries to stand up in the saddle and falls off into a plume of sand. Fatou looks up at me, laughing.

The group are from a small village called Illighadad in the Tuareg region of the Sahara in western Niger. While the region has produced some celebrated guitarists, acts such as Bombino, Mdou Moctar and Tinariwen’s Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Fatou is the first ever Tuareg woman to play guitar professionally.

She started the band in 2016 with her cousin Alamnou Akrouni, who plays percussion and sings. A third member, Mariama Salah Aswan, recently left to start a family and was replaced by Fatimata Ahmadelher, the Tuareg’s second-ever female guitarist, who also contributes vocals and percussion. They are in their late 20s, they say, although they have no birth certificates. Fatou’s brother, Abdoulaye Madassane, joins them on tour, providing rhythm guitar.

Another brother, Ahmoudou, introduced Fatou to the instrument, albeit inadvertently, when he brought one home from Libya. Fatou, aged about 10, began teaching herself to play in secret, sneaking off to practise every time her brother was out. The sight of a woman holding the guitar was in itself controversial. “My father told me to stop wasting my time,” says Fatou, talking through an interpreter. “I should be busy looking after the cows.” But she persisted, and people began to take notice.

Among them was Christopher Kirkley, a music fan from Portland, Oregon, who started the record label Sahel Sounds in 2010 as a way of bringing south-Saharan music to a wider audience. He had heard about Fatou playing guitar at weddings, and managed to track her down. After hearing her play at home in the village, Kirkley recorded Les Filles’ eponymous first album, with Alamnou playing tende, a traditional Tuareg goatskin drum, and Fatou playing fingerpicked blues on an acoustic guitar. They play folksongs they have known all their lives – love songs and odes to nomadic life – with the sound of local people laughing and singing along in the background.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fatou Seidi Ghali … sneaked off to play the guitar. Photograph: Álvaro López

Tende music, named after the drum, is played at traditional Tuareg courting rituals, where all the women in a village sing to each other in a call-and-response style. As they sing, men approach on camelback, trying to catch the eye of a potential suitor while the camels’ hooves move in time with the music.

How important is music to the Tuareg? This question elicits quizzical looks. “Everyone listens. Everyone plays,” says Fatimata.

“For love, for pain, for enjoyment,” adds Abdoulaye. “When there is tension in the village, musicians come to calm everyone down.” Different occasions require different kinds of music, tende being one and takamba, a faster style built around a three- or four-stringed loot instrument known as the ngoni, is another, often played at weddings.

Fatou played the ngoni before she ever picked up a guitar. She created Les Filles’ sound by combining these influences – tende, takamba and hausa music, a folk style from Nigeria. The band’s success means she is treated “like a queen” when she returns home, with local people asking for photos and offering motorcycle lifts wherever she goes. She is modest when I ask what she hopes to achieve with her band: “Helping the village, buying medicines, supporting my brothers and sisters.”

We meet shortly after their performance at the Womad festival, and Fatou and Fatimata are arguing heatedly in Tamasheq, their native tongue. The gig didn’t go well, at least not in their view. The sound engineers struggled with the calabash – a pumpkin-like fruit cut in half and partly submerged in water, drummed to mimic camels’ hooves – and the band had to swap instruments a few times to try to get rid of the feedback. The crowd was enraptured nonetheless.

Like the Guardian, Womad recently removed “world music” from its lexicon to avoid the inadequacy of grouping together hundreds of geographically disparate genres. The festival’s name recalls another term that may be more fitting for Les Filles: “nomad” is a tag worn proudly by the Sahara-roaming Tuareg people, and an equivalent Tamasheq word, amahegh, meaning a Tuareg of noble heart, translates as “free man”. As they continue on a world tour that has already taken them to Australia, Israel, Sweden and Canada, Les Filles are giving the words new meaning.

Les Filles de Illighadad’s world tour continues. Their second album, Eghass Malan (Sahel Sounds), is out now.