Niger’s public television was still in black and white when a young ANEWAL watched Sam Fan Thomas dance on it. “We all wanted to dance like him”, he remembers of the Cameroonian singer, whose “African Typic Collection” was an international dance-floor hit in 1984. Decades later his hero has produced and sung on “Zennemigazat”, released in August as the first single from Timchar, the album that followed on 10 October through World Music Network.

The name ANEWAL means “walking man”, and Alhousseini Mohamed Anivolla inherited it from his grandfather. He is a guitarist and singer from the Tuareg, the nomadic people of the Sahara, and was raised as a nomad in Niger. In 2004 he co-founded Etran Finatawa, a band that put Tuareg musicians alongside the Wodaabe, their neighbours and rivals for pasture, and took their songs to five continents. The British dance duo Disclosure made a track out of samples of the band in 2020 and named it “Etran”.

ANEWAL and Thomas recorded “Zennemigazat” at Thomas’s studio in Douala, the Cameroonian port city. ANEWAL plays desert blues, the electric guitar music of the Tuareg, in phrases that circle back on themselves beneath his rough-edged voice. Thomas’s production brings in makassi, his own faster version of makossa, Cameroon’s dance music, and he sings alongside ANEWAL. The album’s title means “things that have gone”, and ANEWAL has dedicated it to his mother.

Stream “Zennemigazat” HERE