Lying in a tent erected outside his house, Maulud Emhamed Sidi Bashir is listening to a small silver handheld radio. In the Sahrawi refugee camps near Tindouf in south-western Algeria, people often set up traditional tents like this on the doorsteps of newer buildings. The crackling electric guitar notes Bashir, 75, is listening to are a similar mix of traditional and modern. Many of the songs, his relatives say, are by a band called El Wali.

It can take a while to figure out what, exactly, El Wali is. There is not much information on Google and only one album on YouTube (without the names of the singers or musicians). The very place where the band originated, the Western Sahara, is a question mark to most people. But El Wali has become a sort of national orchestra, a group whose songs don’t have credits and don’t belong to anybody; a shapeshifting entity that changes members over generations.

Driving through the Hamada desert, Lud Mahmud, a member of the independence movement Polisario Front, tries to explain. He points to the camp spread across the flat rocky plain. “This is El Wali,” he says. A few kilometres later, at the next camp, he says again: “This is El Wali.” The concept is clear: everything is El Wali when it comes to Polisario music. Some members stay in the band longer than others, but there have been so many that each camp has certainly provided more than one.

Situated between Morocco and Mauritania, this desert was a Spanish province – and one of the last European colonies in Africa – until 1975, when Spain handed it over to Morocco. The Western Sahara’s native people, the Sahrawis, were a mixture of nomadic tribes with almost no concept of nation before Morocco forced them from their land. In the late 1970s, they found refuge in south-western Algeria, where, unified by the common enemy, they laid the foundations of a new nation, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR).

Led by the leftwing Polisario Front, they started a guerrilla war against Morocco that lasts to this day. The conflict has recently intensified, especially after the then-US President Donald Trump recognised Moroccan claims over the territory in 2020. Although largely forgotten by the international community, this is one of Africa’s longest wars and a continuing fight against colonisation (Western Sahara is considered by the UN a non-self-governing territory, essentially a colony of Morocco).

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In 1994, El Wali went to Belgium for a recording session organised by Oxfam. “I remember Shueta and the band,” says Hilt Teuwen, who managed the production. “I had met them in the camps and invited them to Belgium. The result was a very good quality recording.” This was a fabulous album called Tiris, 13 songs played with three singers, electric guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and tidinit, a traditional Sahrawi lute. It is a mix of joyful yet nostalgic tunes that tell the origins of the war against Morocco and the story of a people in exile dreaming of independence. “We kept in touch for a while, then the composition of the band changed – but El Wali as such still exists.”

The world – or at least the west – would have probably lost track of Tiris if it wasn’t for a self-described “guerrilla ethnomusicologist” and producer from Oregon named Christopher Kirkley. Around 2009, Kirkley was touring the Sahel (a stretch of the southern Sahara) and west Africa to collect samples of local music for an album series called Music from Saharan Cellphones.

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‘This music survived in a network of phones’: El Wali, the shapeshifting voice of Saharan strugglehttps://t.co/HZ37xW8utA

— Carlos Cristóbal (@CarlosSaharaui) March 14, 2024